INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN CYBERSPACE:

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

 In common use, property is simply ‘one’s own thing’ and

refers to the relationship between individuals and the
objects which they see as being their own to dispense
with as they see fit.
 Property is often conceptualized as the rights of
‘ownership’ as defined in law.
 Private property is that which belongs to an individual;
public property is that which belongs to a community
collectively or a State.
 The term intellectual property reflects the idea that this
subject matter is the product of the mind or the
intellect, and that intellectual property rights may be
protected at law in the same way as any other form of
property.
 Intellectual property laws are territorial such that the
registration or enforcement of IP rights must be
pursued separately in each jurisdiction of interest.
 There are various kinds of tools of protection that come
under the umbrella term ‘intellectual property’.
Important among these are the following:

 Patents
 Trademarks
 Geographical Indications
 Layout Designs of Integrated Circuits
 Trade Secrets
 Copyrights
 Industrial Designs
Copyright
(Basic Concept )
 Copyright is a right given by law to the creators of
literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works and
producers of cinematograph films and sound recordings
to do or authorize the doing of certain acts with regard
to their creations.
 It is a kind of protection against unauthorized use
or misuse of a work, but for a limited duration.
 Generally the rights include the rights of
authorship, reproduction, distribution,
communication to the public, broadcasting,
adaptation and translation.
 In India, copyright is governed by the Copyright Act,
1957, the Copyright Rules, 1958 and the International
Copyright Order, 1999.
 The Copyright Act provides the basic law so far as
copyrights are concerned, the Copyright Rules contain
the rules and regulations as well as various procedures
and the International Copyright Order extends copyright
protection to works of nationals of specified foreign
countries.
Rights Included in the term ‘Copyright’
 Copyright is a bundle of rights and this bundle can be
broadly classified into two categories, viz. economic
rights and moral rights.
 Economic rights are so called because “they imply as a
rule that within the limitations set by the copyright law
the owner of the copyright may make all public use of the
work conditional on payment of remuneration”.
(a) Right of Reproduction
(b) Right to Issue Copies of a Work
(c) Rights of Public Performance
(d) Right of Communication to the Public
(e) Adaptation Right
(f) Translation Right
 Infringement of Copyright and Remedies There of
 Any copying or duplication, adaptation, translation,
public performance, communication to the public or
broadcast done without the authorization of the
copyright owner, or even where any work has been
licensed or assigned, any violation of the conditions of
the licence or assignment constitutes copyright
infringement.
Limitations/Exceptions to Copyright
 The rights granted by copyright are exclusive in nature.
This exclusivity is sometimes criticised as monopoly in
favour of the right owners. Therefore, in order to balance
these opposing private and public interests the
legislature provides the remedy in the form of drawing
limitations/exceptions to copyright.
Registration of Copyright
 The Copyright Act provides for registration of works.
However, the registration under the Act is voluntary and
not obligatory.

International Nature of Copyright Protection

 Copyrights are national in nature. This means that your
rights are recognised by your national laws and extend
to the territorial limits of your country.
TRADEMARKS

 A trademark is a distinctive sign of some kind which is

used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its
products and services to consumers, and to distinguish
the business and its products or services from those of
other businesses.
 Conventionally, a trademark comprises a name, word,
phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination
of two or more of these elements.
 The essential function of a trademark is to exclusively
identify the commercial source or origin of products or
services thereby facilitating identification of products
and services which meet the expectations of consumers
as to quality and other characteristics.
Fundamental concepts

 The essential function of a trademark is to exclusively

identify the commercial source or origin of products or
services, so a trademark, properly called, indicates
source or serves as a badge of origin.
 In other words, trademarks serve to identify a particular
business as the source of goods or services.
 The use of a trademark in this way is known
astrademark use. Certain exclusive rights attach to a
registered mark.

The "Registered Trade mark" log

Patent

 Inventions are protected by Patents. It is a legal

monopoly granted to the owner of new invention, for a
limited period of time. It can be granted for product as
well as process.
Regulatory Framework
•The Indian Patents Act, 1970 and the Patent Rules, 2003
are the primary legislations on Patents.
•It regulates the grant, the operative period, revocation,
and infringement of Patents.
•To keep with the requirements of TRIPS Agreement (Trade
Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) the Patents
Act, 1970 was amended in 2005 and Patent Rules, 2003
were amended in 2006.
Conditions of Patentability
 Novelty – a product or process to be patented should be
new. It should not be already published or in use or part
of the existing knowledge.
 Non-obviousness – invention should not be obvious to
the person skilled in the art to which invention relates.
 Useful and capable of industrial application
Rights of patentee
 To exploit the Patent
 To license the Patent to another
 To assign Patent to another
 Surrender the Patent
 Sue for the infringement
LINKING:

 The interactive feature of the Internet’s most popular

information access tool, the World Wide Web, to
hyperlink defines its very culture distinguishing it from
any other communications medium.
 On the Internet, a link is a selectable connection from
one word, picture, or information object to another.
Links usually appear as highlighted, underlined,
otherwise prominent text or picture that can be
selected by the user, resulting in the immediate delivery
and view of another file
Linking is of two types:

 Surface linking: When the home page of a site is linked

it is the case of surface linking.
 Deep linking: When a link bypasses the home page and
goes straight to an internal page within the linked site it
is the case of deep linking.
INLINING

 Inlining or ‘In-line linking’ enables a Web page to

summon different elements from diverse pages or
servers to create a new Web page.
 Instead of copying the elements to the composite page,
the elements are linked in by “pulling in” graphic or
image files from another site and displaying on the
composite Web page.
 Thus, the composite page would consist of a series of
links to other sites and servers.
 While browsing the composite page, the page directs
the browser to get the pictures, graphics etc. from the
original sources
Inlining and Indian Law

 As in linking one has to turn to section 51 read with

section 14 of the Copyright Act, 1957 to test the legality
of inlining.
 By virtue of section 14 and 51, reproducing any
copyrighted work, issuing copies of the work to the
public or communicating the work to the public could
amount to copyright violation.
 The person who employs an inline link on his site is not
causing any reproduction of the copyrighted content
FRAMING

 "Framing" is the process of allowing a user to view the

contents of one website while it is framed by
information from another site, similar to the "picture-
in-picture" feature offered on some televisions.
 Framing may trigger a dispute under copyright and
trademark law theories, because a framed site arguably
alters the appearance of the content and creates the
impression that its owner endorses or voluntarily
chooses to associate with the framer.
P2P NETWORKING
 Peer-to-peer (P2P) is defined as two or more computers
connected by software which enables the connected
computers to transit files or data to other connected
computers.
 In recent usage, P2P has come to describe applications
in which users can use the Internet to exchange files
with each other directly.
 The P2P connection means that it’s a direct link, the file
is being directly transferred from one computer to the
other, it is not going through any mediating server.
 A P2P network does not have the notion of clients or
servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously
function as both “clients” and “servers” to the other
nodes on the network.
Fig: P2P Network Model
Domain Names

 Originally the purpose of Internet domain names was to

locate a web site on the Internet.
 But in today’s world the importance of domain names
has gone much beyond web site location.
 They are used to identify the goods and services which
a particular company is offering, be it online or offline.
So, domain names serve the purpose of trademarks.
TYPES OF DOMAIN NAMES

 Every domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD)

name.
 TLD is the last part of a domain name; that is, the letters
which follow the final ‘dot’ of any domain name.
generic Top-level Domain (gTLD)

 A gTLD is a top-level domain used by a particular class

of organization.
 These are three or more letters long, and are named for
the type of organization that they represent (for
example, .com for commercial organizations, .int for
international organizations).
 But some of these gTLDs have become unrestricted,
that means they no longer represent any particular type
of organization and anyone could get a domain name
under it.
 .com - for commercial organizations, but unrestricted
 .coop - for cooperatives
 .edu - for educational establishments
 .gov - for governments and their agencies in the U.S.A.
 .info - for informational sites, but unrestricted
 .int - for international organizations established by
treaty
 .jobs - for employment-related sites
 .name - for families and individuals
 .net - originally for network infrastructures, now
unrestricted
 .org - originally for organizations not clearly falling
within the other gTLDs,
country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD)

 ccTLD is used and reserved for a country.

 These are two letters long, and most of them
correspond to the ISO 3166-1 standard for country
codes.
 The administration of a ccTLD is left to the specific
country concerned and thus each ccTLD policy setting
out the rules for allocating domains is distinct from the
other
ISPs AND THEIR ROLE IN COMMUNICATION ON
THE INTERNET:

 ISP is an entity that connects people to the Internet and

provides other allied services such as Web site building
and hosting.
 An ISP has the equipment and the telecommunication
line access required to have a point of presence on the
Internet for the geographic area served.
 Various kinds of intermediaries are involved in
delivering content online to end-users, as making a
work available over the Internet will involve a chain of
intermediaries.
ISP Liability under the Information Technology
Act, 2000

 In India the provisions relating to the ISPs are

specifically legislated in the IT Act, 2000 where an
Internet Service Provider is referred to as Network
service provider and Explanation (a) to s. 79 defines it
as:
 “Network service provider” means an intermediary.
Intermediary again has been defined under section 2(w)
as:
 “Intermediary” with respect to any particular electronic
message means any person who on behalf of another
person receives stores or transmits that message or
provides any service with respect to that message.
Digital rights management (DRM)

 Digital rights management (DRM) is a systematic

approach to copyright protection for digital media.
 The purpose of DRM is to prevent unauthorized
redistribution of digital media and restrict the ways
consumers can copy content they've purchased.
 DRM products were developed in response to the rapid
increase in online piracy of commercially marketed
material, which proliferated through the widespread use
of peer-to-peer file exchange programs.
 Typically DRM is implemented by embedding code that
prevents copying, specifies a time period in which the
content can be accessed or limits the number of devices
the media can be installed on.
SEARCH ENGINES AND THEIR ABUSE:

 Information and Internet are synonyms. It is difficult to

conceive the gigantic quantum of information present
on the Internet. It runs in many billions of pages and still
growing.
 According to some estimates the Internet is doubling its
size every four months and with this increase in size
comes a proportional increase in information.
 Search engines have come to acquire a unique and
important position on the overall Internet system.
 They have become the presenters of information that is
provided by others.
What are Search Engines?

 A web search engine is a software system that is

designed to search for information on the World Wide
Web.
 The search results are generally presented in a line of
results often referred to as search engine results
pages (SERPs).
 The information may be a mix of web pages, images,
and other types of files.
 Some search engines also mine data available
in databases oropen directories. Unlike web directories,
which are maintained only by human editors, search
engines also maintain real-timeinformation by running
an algorithm on a web crawler.
THE PROCESS: HOW A SEARCH ENGINE WORKS:
ABUSE OF THE PROCESS: SPAMDEXING

 Spamdexing, which is a word derived from “spam”

and “indexing,” refers to the practice of search engine
spamming.
 It is a form of SEO spamming.
 SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine
Optimization, which is the art of having your website
optimized, or attractive, to the major search engines
for optimal indexing.
 Spamdexing is the practice of creating websites that
will be illegitimately indexed with a high position in
the search engines.
 Sometimes, spamdexing is used to try and manipulate
a search engine’s understanding of a category.
 Hidden or Invisible Text
One way of fooling a search engine is to match certain
keywords by making them the same colour as the background
or by using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code
such as “no frame” sections.

 Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical Search
engine optimization technique. Keyword stuffing occurs when a
web page is loaded with keywords in the content.

 Meta Tag Stuffing

A meta tag is a coding statement in the Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML) that describes some aspect of the contents of
a Web page

 Cloaking
Cloaking is another search engine optimisation technique
in which the content presented to the search engine crawler is
different from that presented to the users’ browser.
NON ORIGINAL DATABASES:

 Member states of WIPO have been discussing the

possible introduction of international protection of
non-original databases which presently do not
qualify for protection under copyright law.
 The originality requirement that a database must
constitute an intellectual creation by reason of the
selection or arrangement of its contents in order to
enjoy copyright protection means that some
databases are not protected under copyright even
if substantial investments have been made to
produce them.
 PROTECTION OF DATABASES THROUGH
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAWS:
 The WIPO Diplomatic Conference on Certain Copyright and
Neighboring Rights Questions held in December 1996, which
adopted the WIPO Internet Treaties, had among its documents
a Basic Proposal for the Substantive Provisions of the Treaty on
Intellectual Property in Respect of Databases to be considered
by the Diplomatic Conference. Although agreement was not
reached, the Conference adopted aRecommendation
Concerning Databases.
 In 2002, at the request of the Standing Committee on Copyright
and Related Rights (SCCR), the WIPO Secretariat
commissioned six studies on the economic impact of
international database protection on developing countries and
countries in transition, and prepared a summary on existing
legislation concerning intellectual property (IP) in non-original
databases. These studies were discussed by the SCCR.