U.S. copyright law gives successful plaintiffs who promptly registered their works the ability to elect to receive an award of statutory damages, which can be granted in any amount between $750 and $150,000 per infringed work. This provision gives scant guidance about where in that range awards...

The protectability (or not) of computer program interfaces, the legality of reverse engineering of program code to extract interface information and the reimplementation of interfaces in complementary or competing programs was deeply controversial in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For the past...

Many commentators and policymakers have recognized that patents on interfaces can be and sometimes have been exercised to block the development of interoperable technologies. Out of concern about the exclusionary power of such patents, they have proposed a wide array of legal and policy measures...