Two recent cases on software copyright and website hyperlinks have shown just how long it can take for legal principles to catch up.

Software isn't exactly a new phenomenon and you might have thought that it would be clear by now .

But the wheels of justice turn slowly. Although computer programs were brought within the scope of copyright protection by Act of Parliament in 1988, there's no actual legal definition of a computer program.

Last year, an English judge accepted that it's not copyright infringement merely to copy the functionality of a software program.

But even then the court fudged key issues around the protectability of interfaces and other parts of a program.