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Computer Science > Computers and Society

arXiv:2008.07273 (cs)
[Submitted on 21 Jul 2020]

Title:Why a computer program is a functional whole

Authors:C. Maria Keet
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Abstract:Sharing, downloading, and reusing software is common-place, some of which is carried out legally with open source software. When it is not legal, it is unclear just how many copyright infringements and trade secret violations have taken place: does an infringement count for the artefact as a whole or perhaps for each file of the program? To answer this question, it must first be established whether a program should be considered as an integral whole, a collection, or a mere set of distinct files, and why. We argue that a program is a functional whole, availing of, and combining, arguments from mereology, granularity, modularity, unity, and function to substantiate the claim. The argumentation and answer contributes to the ontology of software artefacts, may assist industry in litigation cases, and demonstrates that the notion of unifying relation is operationalisable. Indirectly, it provides support for continued modular design of artefacts following established engineering practices.
Comments: 25 pages, 5 figures, extended technical report of the accepted FOIS 2020 paper
Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
ACM classes: I.2.4; H.1.m; K.5.0
Cite as: arXiv:2008.07273 [cs.CY]
  (or arXiv:2008.07273v1 [cs.CY] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2008.07273

Submission history

From: C. Maria Keet [view email]
[v1] Tue, 21 Jul 2020 10:47:58 UTC (1,401 KB)
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