[1] It is the centerpiece of lawsuits, trials, and settlements when companies are in dispute over issues involving software patents, copyrights, and trade secrets.
Past methods of code comparison included hashing, statistical analysis, text matching, and tokenization.
These methods compared software code and produced a single measure indicating whether copying had occurred.
This work is still left to human experts using their knowledge and experience, but it is a problem that many in software forensics are trying to automate by finding an algorithm or simplifying process.
Once an analysis has been performed using forensic tools and procedures, analysts can then begin looking at subjective evidence like comments in the code.