Pamela Samuelson · September 2011
79 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1746 (2011)
Forty years ago, Justice Stephen Breyer expressed serious doubts about the economic soundness of extending copyright protection to computer programs in his seminal article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs. A decade later, Congress enacted legislation to protect programs through copyright law, notwithstanding Breyer’s cogently expressed doubts. This Article revisits The Uneasy Case for Copyright and concludes that although Breyer’s skepticism about copyright for computer programs was warranted at the time, the case for copyrighting computer programs has become easier since then.
