Key Intellectual

Property Issues

Lesson 9
Topic Objectives:
At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• provide examples in each key intellectual property issue;

• stipulate an action on how to avoid issues in plagiarism,
cyber-squatting and trademark infringement;
• demonstrate how to encourage and defend intellectual
property rights;
• outline steps to prevent plagiarism among students; and
• appreciate the importance of protecting intellectual
property rights.
Key Intellectual Property Issues

Issues that apply to intellectual property and information

technology:

▪ Plagiarism
▪ Reverse engineering
▪ Competitive intelligence
▪ Trademark infringement
▪ Cybersquatting
 Plagiarism

• The act of stealing someone’s ideas or words and passing

them off as one’s own.

• To compound the problem, hundreds of online “paper

mills” enable users to download entire term papers.
But can words and ideas really
be stolen?
Plagiarism

All of the following are considered plagiarism:

• turning in someone else's work as your own

• copying words or ideas from someone else without
giving credit
• failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
Plagiarism

• giving incorrect information about the source of a

quotation

• changing words but copying the sentence structure of a

source without giving credit

• copying so many words or ideas from a source that it

makes up the majority of your work, whether you give
credit or not.
Plagiarism

• Plagiarism has become an issue from elementary schools

to the highest levels of academia.
• Plagiarism is also common outside academia
• Many students:
• Do not understand what constitutes plagiarism
• Believe that all electronic content is in the public
domain
Plagiarism

Plagiarism Detection Systems

• Allow teachers, corporations, law firms, and publishers to
check for matching text in different documents as a means
of identifying potential plagiarism.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism

Turnitin

• a software product developed by California-based

iParadigms

• supports 15 languages and is used by over 10,000

educational institutions around the world

• uses three primary databases for content matching with

over 24 billion Web pages
Plagiarism

Turnitin (con’t)

• 300 million archived student papers

• 120 million articles from over 110,000 journals,
periodicals, and books.
• it is designed to meet the needs of members of the
information industry, such as publishers, research
facilities, legal firms, government agencies, and financial
institutions
Group Activity

Outline at least 3 multistep approach that a campus

might take to successfully prevent plagiarism among its
students.
Plagiarism

Steps to combat student plagiarism

▪ Help students understand what constitutes plagiarism

and why they need to cite sources
▪ Show students how to document Web pages
▪ Schedule major writing assignments in portions due over
the course of the term
▪ Tell students that instructors are aware of Internet paper
mills and plagiarism detection services
▪ Incorporate detection into an antiplagiarism program
Reverse Engineering

Process of taking something apart in order to:

▪ Understand it
▪ Build a copy of it
▪ Improve it
Reverse Engineering

Reverse Engineering
Process
Reverse Engineering
Reverse Engineering

• Applied to computer:
▪ Hardware
▪ Software

• Hardware reverse engineering involves taking apart a

device to see how it works.
Reverse Engineering

• Software reverse engineering involves reversing a

program's machine code (the string of 0s and 1s that are
sent to the logic processor) back into the source code that
it was written in, using program language statements.
Reverse Engineering

Courts have ruled in favor of reverse engineering:

• To enable interoperability

Ethics of using reverse engineering are debated

• Fair use if it provides useful function/interoperability
• Can uncover designs that someone else has developed at
great cost and taken care to protect
Competitive Intelligence

▪ Is legally obtained information gathered using sources

available to the public.

▪ legally obtained information that is gathered to help a

company gain an advantage over its rivals.
Competitive Intelligence

Example:

▪ some companies have employees who monitor the public

announcements of property transfers to detect any plant
or store expansions of competitors.
Competitive Intelligence or
Espionage?
 Competitive Intelligence

• Not the same as industrial espionage, which uses illegal

means to obtain business information not available to the
general public.

• Without proper management safeguards, it can cross over to

industrial espionage.

• Competitive intelligence analysts must avoid unethical or

illegal actions, such as lying, misrepresentation, theft,
bribery, or eavesdropping with illegal devices.
 Trademark

• Trademark is logo, package design, phrase, sound, or word

that enables consumer to differentiate one company’s
product from another’s.

• Trademark owner can prevent others from using the same

mark or a confusingly similar mark on a product’s label
Trademark

The Lanham Act of 1946 (Trademark Act)

▪ The law gives the trademark’s owner the right to prevent
others from using the same mark or a confusingly similar
mark on a product’s label.
Trademark Infringement

• Trademark infringement is the unauthorized use of a

trademark or service mark on or in connection with
goods and/or services in a manner that is likely to cause
confusion , deception, or mistake about the source of
the goods and/or services.
Trademark Infringement
 Cybersquatting

Cybersquatting means using somebody's name and creating a

website for one's benefit.

• For example, if a random person, Joe,

made a website called
www.michaeljordan.com, pretending to
be Jordan, etc, he would make
unwarranted profits, and have an unfair
advantage over his online colleagues in
terms of revenue from advertising
 Cybersquatting

Cybersquatters

• Register domain names for famous trademarks or

company names

• Hope the trademark’s owner will buy the domain

name for a large sum of money
 Cybersquatting

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

(ICANN)

• A nonprofit corporation responsible for managing the

Internet’s domain name system.

• Several top-level domains (.com, .edu, edu., .gov, .int,

.mil, .net, .org, aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name,
.pro, .asis, .cat, .mobi, .tel, .xxx and .travel)
END
 Assignment 1

Explore related condition from the given intellectual property issue. List
down at least one situation of each IP issues and analyze on how to
avoid them.

Reverse Engineering Cyber-squatting Trademark Infringement

___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
 Assignment 2

Outline at least 3 multistep approach that a campus might take to

successfully prevent plagiarism among its students.

___________________________ _________________________ _________________________

___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
___________________________ _________________________ _________________________
CLOSING
PRAYER