Registration of Сopyright to Mobile Applications for iOS & Android

At the beginning of 2023, the access to the Internet through mobile devices accounts for about 60% of all traffic. Therefore, despite the high competition in the field of mobile applications, there is still room for fresh ideas and non-standard products. If you are ready to create an application, you should think about copyright protection for software. Read below to learn what protection of mobile applications contains.

Mobile app intellectual property: things to keep in mind

Written code, like a mobile application, is protected by US copyright law. It applies to all expressions that have been implemented in the mobile application, while the ideas, program logic, algorithms and techniques are not considered to be the intellectual property of the owner. 
Copyright protection means that the author has the right to copy, distribute, and display the work in public. Important: If you do not register your product with the US Copyright Office, you will not be able to defend your rights in court if someone tries to use them illegally. Once registered, you will be eligible for damages up to $150,000. 

Source code from other sources, including open source, is not protected by copyright. It means that if this piece of code is not the original work of your development team, you cannot register it with the Copyright Office. When using open source, you must comply with the license agreement, according to which copyright in the source code is protected, but adding your own code is allowed. In case of violation of the source code license agreement, the application may be removed from the App Store. 

An important step is to register the application with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Registration will protect the application, and inform you about the ownership of the rights to the product name. 

Read also: What Technology Can Protect Intellectual Property Rights?

Register an idea for an app in the App Store 

The practice of working to protect the rights to a mobile application shows that the registration process in the App Store is more complicated than in Google Play. 

1. Name reservation in the App Store. If several applications of your company with the same or similar names are developed for Google Play, then it will not work on iOS. As the App Store has strict policies to prevent plagiarism and app name cloning, you need to reserve an app name in advance. After such a step on your part, any publication of an application with the same name will not be allowed. The name reservation process is free and is done on App Store Connect, where a developer account is registered. The name must contain up to 50 characters; in the case when the application is also released on the Android platform, it is desirable to limit the name to 30 characters. Besides, you need to reserve a domain name by linking it to social media pages and selecting application categories. 
2. To protect the application name and logo, register a trademark. This way you can protect copyright in court if someone wants to copy images, expressions, and graphic marks. The business strategy defines whether a trademark belongs to two or three classes. If a dispute arises, you have the tools to protect your property rights. 

The intellectual property of a mobile application is one of the areas that the Software Development Hub team is working at as part of a client project. Our experts will advise on and help ensure the protection of the mobile application for maximum product and copyright protection, using effective products and technologies. 

Tools for dealing with intellectual property

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