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Lesson 3

This document defines and discusses various forms of intellectual property including copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and related legal issues. Copyright protects original works, patents protect inventions, and trade secrets protect confidential business information. The document outlines ownership rights and limitations for each type of intellectual property, common infringement issues, and debates around enforcing intellectual property laws for software and online content.

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Christa Williams
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12 views19 pages

Lesson 3

This document defines and discusses various forms of intellectual property including copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and related legal issues. Copyright protects original works, patents protect inventions, and trade secrets protect confidential business information. The document outlines ownership rights and limitations for each type of intellectual property, common infringement issues, and debates around enforcing intellectual property laws for software and online content.

Uploaded by

Christa Williams
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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INTELLECTUAL

PROPERTY
Agenda
1. What is intellectual Property (IP)?
2. Copyright
3. Patents
4. Trade Secrets
5. Intellectual Property Issues
WHAT IS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?
• Intellectual property is a term used to describe works of the mind—
such as art, books, films, formulas, inventions, music, and processes—
that are distinct and owned or created by a single person or group.
• Copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets form a complex
body of law relating to the ownership of intellectual property, which
represents a large and valuable asset to most companies.
• If these assets are not protected, other companies can copy or steal
them, resulting in significant loss of revenue and competitive
advantage.
WHAT IS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?
A copyright is the exclusive right to:
• distribute, display, perform, or reproduce an original work in copies;
• to prepare derivative works based on the work;
• to and grant these exclusive rights to others.
Copyright
• Copyright infringement is a violation of the rights secured by the owner of a
copyright.
• Infringement occurs when someone copies a substantial and material part of
another’s copyrighted work without permission.
• Copyright law has proven to be extremely flexible in covering new technologies,
including software, video games, multimedia works, and web pages.
• However, evaluating the originality of a work can be difficult and disagreements
over whether or not a work is original sometimes lead to litigation.
• Copyrights provide less protection for software than patents; software that
produces the same result in a slightly different way may not infringe a copyright
if no copying occurred.
Copyright
• The fair use doctrine established four factors for courts to consider
when deciding whether a particular use of copyrighted property is fair
and can be allowed without penalty:
1. the purpose and character of the use
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the portion of the copyrighted work used, and
4. the effect of the use on the value of the copyrighted work.
• The use of copyright to protect computer software raises many
complicated issues of interpretation of what constitutes infringement.
Copyright
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), implements two WIPO
treaties
• The DMCA also makes it illegal to circumvent a technical protection or
develop and provide tools that allow others to access a technologically
protected work.
• In addition, the DMCA limits the liability of Internet service providers for
copyright infringement by their subscribers or customers.
• Some view the DMCA as a boon to the growth of the Internet and its use as
a conduit for innovation and freedom of expression.
• Others believe that the DMCA has given excessive powers to copyright
holders.
Patents
• A patent is a grant of property right issued to an inventor that
permits its owner:
• to exclude the public from making, using, or selling a protected invention,
• it allows for legal action against violators.
• A patent prevents copying as well as independent creation (which is
allowable under copyright law).
Patents
For an invention to be eligible for a patent, it must fall into one of three
statutory classes of items that can be patented:
1. it must be useful
2. it must be novel, and
3. it must not be obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the same
field.
Types of Patents
• A utility patent is :
• “issued for the invention of a new and useful process, machine, manufacture,
• or composition of matter,
• or a new and useful improvement thereof.”
• A design patent, is:
• “issued for a new, original, and ornamental design embodied in
• or applied to an article of manufacture,”
• permits its owner to exclude others from making, using, or selling the design
in question.
Trade Secrets
• To qualify as a trade secret, information must have economic value
and must not be readily ascertainable.
• In addition, the trade secret’s owner must have taken steps to
maintain its secrecy.
• Trade secret laws do not prevent someone from using the same idea
if it was developed independently or from analyzing an end product
to figure out the trade secret behind it.
Trade Secrets
Trade secret law has three key advantages over the use of patents and
copyrights in protecting companies from losing control of their
intellectual property:
1. There are no time limitations on the protection of trade secrets,
unlike patents and copyrights;
2. There is no need to file any application or otherwise disclose a trade
secret to outsiders to gain protection; and
3. There is no risk that a trade secret might be found invalid in court.
Intellectual Property Issues: Plagiarism

• Plagiarism is the act of stealing someone’s ideas or words and passing


them off as one’s own.
• Plagiarism detection systems enable people to check the originality of
documents and manuscripts.
• Reverse engineering is the process of breaking something down in
order to understand it, build a copy of it, or improve it.
• It was originally applied to computer hardware but is now commonly
applied to software.
Intellectual Property Issues: Reverse
Engineering
• Reverse engineering is the process of breaking something down in
order to understand it, build a copy of it, or improve it.
• It was originally applied to computer hardware but is now commonly
applied to software.
• In some situations, reverse engineering might be considered unethical
because it enables access to information that another organization
may have copyrighted or classified as a trade secret.
• Recent court rulings and software license agreements that forbid
reverse engineering, as well as restrictions in the DMCA, have made
reverse engineering a riskier proposition
Intellectual Property Issues: Open-source
code
• Open-source code is any program whose source code is made
available for use or modification, as users or other developers see fit.
• The basic premise behind open-source code is that when many
programmers can read, redistribute, and modify it, the software
improves.
• Open-source code can be adapted to meet new needs, and bugs can
be rapidly identified and fixed.
Intellectual Property Issues: Competitive
Intelligence
• Competitive intelligence is legally obtained information that is
gathered to help a company gain an advantage over its rivals.
• It is not the same as industrial espionage, which is the use of illegal
means to obtain business information that is not readily available to
the general public.
• Industrial espionage is a serious crime that carries heavy penalties.
• Competitive intelligence analysts must take care to avoid unethical or
illegal behavior, including lying, misrepresentation, theft, bribery, or
eavesdropping with illegal devices.
Intellectual Property Issues: Trademark
• A trademark is a logo, package design, phrase, sound, or word that
enables a consumer to differentiate one company’s products from
another’s.
• Website owners who sell trademarked goods or services must take
care to ensure they are not sued for trademark infringement.
Intellectual Property Issues: Cyber-squatting
• Cyber-squatters register domain names for famous trademarks or
company names to which they have no connection, with the hope
that the trademark’s owner will eventually buy the domain name for a
large sum of money.
• The main tactic organizations use to circumvent cybersquatting is to
protect a trademark by registering numerous domain names and
variations as soon as they know they want to develop a web
presence.
End

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