Not in the same way that it is protected by patents! Copyright protects the expression, not the idea. If the idea isn&#x27;t patented, then someone else can implement it from scratch using their own copyrighted code.<p>Hardware blueprints are also copyrighted; and that also doesn&#x27;t protect the inherent idea.<p>Nete that this new rejection in the Indian patent system is not only of software patents but in general &quot;mathematical methods&quot;.<p>If you come up with some amazing new crypto after 25 years of painstaking research, India says that you cannot patent the idea, and so anyone who learns about it can write implementations of it in code and distribute them in India without having to license anything from you.<p>Of course, most software patents are garbage, but that&#x27;s because they are for trivial things which anyone could come up with easily and&#x2F;or have tons of prior art that the lazy slobs at the USPTO didn&#x27;t bother hunting down, or are so broad that they apply to anything. (E.g. &quot;some processing method for converting one file to another&quot; or whatever).<p>It&#x27;s not so clear cut that that, say, RSA should not have been patented.