Intellectual Property Summary
Intellectual Property describes such things as books, art, films, formulas, inventions, music and processes that are distinct and created by a single person or group.
Copywrite laws protects authored works such as art, books, films and music. Copywrite gurantees developers the right to their works for a certain amount of time.
Patent laws protects inventions. A patent permits owners to exclude the public from making, using, or selling a protected invention, and it allows legal action against any violators. The rights to a patent extent only to the U.S and U.S. territories, not to foreign countries.
Trade secrets law protects information that is critical to an organization's success. The Economic Espionage Act (EEA) of 1996 imposes penalities of up to $10 million and 15 years in prison for the theift of trade secrets.
With the help of Internet, it's now easy to copy/paste entire paragraphs into term papers without proper citation- this is called Plagiarism. Plagiarism is the theft or someone else's ideas/words and using it as one's own.
Reserve engineering is the process of taking something apart in order to understand it, build a copy of it, and/or improve it.
Open Source Code refers to a program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or otehr developers see fit.
Competitive Intelligence is the gathering of legally obtainable information to help a company gain an advantage over its rivals.
Cybersquatting is when someone registers a webside domain that contain a famous trademark or company name to which the person has no connection, with the hopes that the trademark's legitimate owners will pay to gain ownership of the domain.
Discussion Question #3
Q: Identify atleast 5 actions a firm should take to protect its trade secrets.
A: 1. Organizations must educate employees about the importance of maintaining the secrecy of corporate inforation. 1. The inforation must be labeled clearly as confidential and should only be accessible by a limited amount of people. 3. Nondisclosure clause to employees contract which states that employees cannot take copies of computer programs or reveal the details of software owned by a firm, even when they are leaving. 4. Have an experience memeber of HR conduct an exit interview in which the employee is asked to signed an acknowledgement of responsibility not to give out trade secrets. 5. Noncompete agreement requires employees not to work for any competitors for a period of time, perhaps one or two years.
http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/intellectual/
1. Reverse Engineering: is when someone takes apart someting (software, a device etc) to analyze it's structure, function, and/or operations in hopes of learning about it to creature a new product that's similar, almost identical to the old product.
- In the U.S and many other countries, even if the product is protected under trade secrets, it is usually legal to do reverse engineering once the product was obtained legally.
2. Google GPrint: in 2005ogle launched a project that placed entire books in an online library where viewers can view for free and save images of pages from the text. Google waas sued by Author's Guild for copyright infringments and they reached a settlement in October 2008 where Google agreeded to pay $125 million to rightholders of books they have scanned and to create a Book Rights Registry. The settlement is ye tot be approved by the court.
3. UCITA: Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act is a proposed act to govern
such areas as software licensing, online access, and other transactions in computer information. UCITA attempts to clarify and/or codify rules regarding fair use, reverse engineering, consumer protection and warranties, shrinkwrap, and their duration as well as the transferabily of licenses.
- UCITA has meat with controversy because it's said to be unfavorable to the software producers, and disregards the reasonable entitlements of consumers.