INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

University of Benghazi
Faculty of Information Technology
Computing Ethics and Society (IT301)
PREPARED BY: SAMI BENAMER (MSc CS)
Reference: ETHICS IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY-Sixth Edition BY George W. Reynolds
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
As you read this chapter, consider the following questions:
1. What does the term intellectual property encompass, and what measures can
organizations take to protect their intellectual property?
2. What are some of the current issues associated with the protection of intellectual
property?
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. It is protected through copyright, patent, and
trade secret laws.
▪ Copyright law protects authored works, such as art, books, film, and music.
▪ patent law protects inventions.
▪ trade secret law helps safeguard information that is critical to an organization’s
success.
WHAT IS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?
1. Copyrights
▪ A copyright is the exclusive right to distribute, display, perform, or reproduce an
original work in copies or to prepare derivative works based on the work.
▪ Eligible Works The types of work that can be copyrighted include architecture, art,
audiovisual works, choreography, drama, graphics, literature, motion pictures, music,
pantomimes, pictures, sculptures, sound recordings, and other intellectual works.
▪ Fair Use Doctrine Copyright law tries to strike a balance between protecting an
author’s rights and enabling public access to copyrighted works.
1. The purpose and character of the use (such as commercial use or nonprofit,
educational purposes)
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The portion of the copyrighted work used in relation to the work as a whole
4. The effect of the use on the value of the copyrighted work
WHAT IS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?
2. Patents
▪ A patent is a grant of a property right issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
(USPTO) to an inventor. A patent permits its owner to exclude the public from making,
using, or selling a protected invention, and it allows for legal action against violators
▪ Unlike a copyright, a patent prevents independent creation as well as copying. Even if
someone else invents the same item independently and with no prior knowledge of
the patent holder’s invention, the second inventor is excluded from using the patented
device without permission of the original patent holder.
WHAT IS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?
2. Patents (con.)
▪ 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, it
generally permits its owner to exclude others from making, using, or selling the
invention for a period of up to twenty years from the date of patent application filing,
subject to the payment of maintenance fees.
▪ A design patent, which 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.
▪ Patent infringement, or the violation of the rights secured by the owner of a patent,
occurs when someone makes unauthorized use of another’s patent. Unlike with
copyright infringement, there is no specified dollar amount limitation on the monetary
penalty if patent infringement is found.
WHAT IS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?
3. Trade secrets
▪ A trade secret is defined as business information that represents something of
economic value, has required effort or cost to develop, has some degree of
uniqueness or novelty, is generally unknown to the public, and is kept confidential.
▪ Trade secret protection begins by identifying all the information that must be protected
from undisclosed patent applications to market research and business plans and
developing a comprehensive strategy for keeping the information secure.
▪ Trade secret law protects only against the misappropriation of trade secrets. If
competitors come up with the same idea on their own, it is not misappropriation; in
other words, the law doesn’t prevent someone from using the same idea if it was
developed independently.
CURRENT INTELLECTUA LPROPERTY
ISSUES
▪ several issues that apply to intellectual property and information technology, including
plagiarism, reverse engineering, open source code, competitive intelligence,
trademark infringement, and cybersquatting.
▪ Plagiarism is the act of stealing someone’s ideas or words and passing them off as
one’s own.
▪ The explosion of electronic content and the growth of the web have made it easy to
cut and paste paragraphs into term papers and other documents without proper
citation or quotation marks.
▪ Reverse engineering is the process of taking something apart 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 as well.
▪ Reverse engineering of software involves analyzing it to create a new
representation of the system in a different form or at a higher level of abstraction.
CURRENT INTELLECTUA LPROPERTY
ISSUES
▪ 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 a
program’s code, the software improves.
▪ A software developer could attempt to make a program open source simply by
putting it into the public domain with no copyright. This would allow people to share
the program and their improvements, but it would also allow others to revise the
original code and then distribute the resulting software as their own proprietary
product.
▪ Competitive intelligence is legally obtained information that is gathered to help a
company gain an advantage over its rivals. For example, some companies have
employees who monitor the public announcements of property transfers to detect any
plant or store expansions of competitors.
CURRENT INTELLECTUA LPROPERTY
ISSUES
▪ Trademark Infringement
▪ A trademark is a logo, package design, phrase, sound, or word that enables a
consumer to differentiate one company’s products from another’s. Consumers often
cannot examine goods or services to determine their quality or source, so instead
they rely on the labels attached to the products.
▪ 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.
▪ Cybersquatting
▪ Companies that want to establish an online presence know that the best way to
capitalize on the strengths of their brand names and trademarks is to make the
names part of the domain names for their websites.