Intellectual Property

Chapter 4 - Intellectual
Property
IT 5105 – Professional Issues in IT
OpenArc Campus - BIT UCSC - Sem V 2016
Upekha Vandebona
upe.vand@gmail.com
Ref : Tavani, Herman T., “Ethics and technology: controversies, questions, and strategies for ethical computing” , 4th Edition.

Instructional Objectives
 Distinguish among copyrights, patents, trademarks and
trade secrets.
 Discuss the ramifications of non-disclosure agreements
(NDAs).
 Discuss the implications of plagiarism, both in education and
the profession.
 Discuss the consequences of software piracy on information
technology and the role of relevant enforcement
organizations.
 Discuss how intellectual property laws vary internationally.
 Describe consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act.
INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY ACT,
No. 36 OF
2003:

What is Intellectual Property (IP)?
Boralugoda (බ ොරලුබ ොඩ) owns a Dell
laptop computer.
He can control who has access to his
computer and how it is used;
For example Boralugoda has the right to exclude
Galpaatha ( ල්පාත) from using the laptop computer, or,
as its owner, he can grant him unlimited access to it.
Consider once again, Boralugoda’s laptop computer, is a
physical tangible object.
So when Galpaatha have it, then Boralugoda cannot
have it, and vice versa.
Therefore Boralugoda’s laptop is an exclusionary object.

What is Intellectual Property (IP)?
Consider a word processing program which is intangible that
resides in Boralugoda’s computer.
If Boralugoda makes a copy of that program, then both the
Galpaatha and Boralugoda have copies of it.
Therefore word processing program is
non-exclusionary.

Intellectual Objects vs Other Objects
 Unlike physical property, intellectual property
consists of objects that are not tangible.
 These non-tangible(intangible), or intellectual,
objects represent literary/ creative works and
inventions, which are the manifestations or
expressions of ideas.
 Unlike tangible objects, which are exclusionary in
nature, intellectual objects (e.g., software
programs) are non-exclusionary:

Intellectual Objects vs Other Objects
 Quantitative Limitations of Ownership/Production
 Countless digital copies of a software program can be
produced and each at a relatively low cost.
 But a land cannot be produce/own that much.
 Way of protection or legal claim
 Physical objects have clear visibility of boundary.
 For intellectual objects difficult to define the
boundary.

Protection of IP
 For a literary or artistic idea to be protected it
must be expressed in some medium such as a
book or a sheet of paper containing a musical
score.
 If the idea is functional in nature, such as an
invention, it must be expressed as a machine or a
documented design.
 Whereas authors are granted copyright
protections for expressions of their literary ideas,
inventors are given an incentive, in the form of a
patent protection, for expressions of their
functional ideas.

Why Protect?
 Social constructs designed to encourage creators
and inventors to better serve society in general by
bringing forth their creative works and practical
inventions into the market-place.
 To encourage authors and inventors, it is believed
that it is necessary to grant them property rights
in the form of limited monopolies that can result
in financial advantages for them.

SW & HW as IPs
 Introduction of computer software has created
questions regarding intellectual property laws for
which there are no easy answers.
 Innovations in computer hardware, on the contrary,
have clearly qualified for patent protection, and in
this sense, computer hardware inventions are no
different than other kinds of inventions involving
physical objects.
 But questions about whether and how software, as a
kind of intellectual object, should be protected have
been strongly debated in the courts.

Theft
 The legal definition of theft involves taking away
a piece of someone’s property with the
intention permanently to deprive them of it.
 Duplicating software is not identical to stealing
physical property, but we can show that it may
cause harm.

Theft
If Shaggy steals Boralugoda’s laptop, he deprives
Boralugoda of Boralugoda’s right to use a device that
Boralugoda own;
When Fred makes an unauthorized
copy of a proprietary program that
Boralugoda own (as the copyright
holder), he deprives Boralugoda of
income to which Boralugoda entitled.

Theft
 If someone steals your bicycle, you no longer have
it. If someone takes away a computer belonging to
a company, the company no longer has it.
 If you invent a drug that will cure known illnesses
and leave the formula on your desk, someone can
come along, read the formula, remember it, and
go away and make a fortune out of manufacturing
the drug.
 But you still have the formula even though the
other person now has it as well. This shows that
the formula is not a property in the same way that
the bicycle is.

Theft
 Unauthorized copying is harmful because it is a
misuse, misappropriation, or “unfair taking” of
another person’s property against the property
owner’s will.
 Many nations have enacted specific laws and statutes
to protect the rights and interests of “owners” of
computer software programs and applications (as
forms of intellectual property).
 We examine four different types of schemes for
protecting intellectual property rights: copyright law,
patents, trademarks, and trade secrets

DMCA
 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (US copyright law)
Search to download a movie At the bottom of the search results,
you’ll see… HomeWork 1 : Go to the
links provided and read.

Fair Use and First Sale
 To balance the exclusive controls given to copyright
holders against the broader interests of society,
these two provisions have been developed.

• First-sale provision, applies once the original
work has been sold for the first time.
• At this point, the original owner loses rights
over the previously protected work.
• For example, once you purchase a copy of a
(physical) book, you are free to give away,
resell, or even destroy your copy.
• It is not clear, however, that one can give
away media in digital format that is licensed
for use but not, strictly speaking, owned by
a user.
First-sale
• According to the fair-use principle, every
author or publisher may make limited use of
another person’s copyrighted work for
purposes such as criticism, comment, news,
reporting, teaching, and research.
Fair use

First Sale Vs Technology
 Technology could also be seen as threatening the
principle of first sale. Consider that in the case of
a physical book, one can do whatever one wishes
after purchasing it.
 For example, one can give the book to a friend.
Also, one can resell that book, in compliance with
the first-sale provision of copyright law.
 The same is not true, however, of e-books,
because the digitized information contained in
those books cannot be subsequently exchanged
without permission of the copyright holder.

Software Piracy as Copyright Infringement
 Software manufacturers claim to have lost millions of
dollars of potential revenue because of software piracy
by individuals and organizations, both nationally and
globally.
 There are some debatable arguments regard to American
software manufacturers about their loss of revenue due
to the use of pirated software in developing countries.
 Many people and organizations in those countries could not
afford to pay the prices set by American software companies for
their products, so the companies have not lost any (real)
revenues, because their (expensive, by American standards)
software would not sell on the open market in most developing
countries.

Sharing Digital Music & Movies
 Popular Case : Napster (P2P 1st Generation)
 Napster provided a distribution center for
proprietary digital information. Napster’s users
were able to exchanged copyrighted music files,
in MP3 format, with one another.
 In December 1999, the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) sued the Napster
Web site for illegally distributing copyrighted
music on the Internet.

P2P Effect
 P2P systems comprise three categories:
 a centralized indexing system (such as in the original
Napster site),
 a decentralized indexing system,
 a supernode system (where a group of computers can act
as indexing servers).
 Another P2P protocol is Bit Torrent, which enables
large files, such entire music CDs, to be exchanged
more efficiently through a system of networked
computers designated as “peers” and “seeds.”
(Pirate Bay)

Prohibiting
 The entertainment industry, in its effort to crack
down on illicit file sharing, has not been deterred
by the fact that later P2P systems were able to
avoid the legal pitfalls surrounding the
centralized indexing method used by Napster.
 Prohibiting through ISPs for their customers,
through policies in workers/students in
organizations.

The Guilty  Technology ?
 Is it legal to prohibit the use of technology merely
because it could result in copyright infringement?
 Popular Case : Sony v. Universal Studios
 Universal sued to ban the sale of video cassette
recorder (VCR) technology, claiming that Sony,
who manufactured it (Betamax) was liable for
copyright infringement, either directly or
indirectly, because the new technology could be
used to make illegal copies of movies.

“Sony Safe Harbor” Precedent
 The Court ruled that simply because VCR technology
could be used to do something illegal is not sufficient
grounds for banning that technology.
 In essence, it concluded that as long as the
technology was capable of “substantial non-infringing
uses”(SNIU), it could not be barred from sale and
distribution.
 So, in effect, the Court also determined that VCRs did
not violate copyright law merely because they were
capable of substantial copyright infringement.

IP Laws (Globally & Locally)
 Intellectual property laws have been very difficult to
enforce globally, in large part because of jurisdictional
issues.
 In recent years, however, there has been considerable
international cooperation in prosecuting digital piracy
cases across jurisdictional lines.
 For example, in 2009, the owners and operators of the
internationally controversial (Sweden-based) PirateBay
site, who were found guilty of “unlawful transfer” of
copyrighted material, received both fines and jail
sentences.

IP Laws (Globally & Locally)
 In countries such as the United States, some laws
affecting intellectual property apply at the state
level. These laws apply to the sale of goods, as
well as to contracts involved in those sales, and
they often vary from state to state.

Moral Rights
 The personality account of property is sometimes
referred to as the “moral rights”(droits morals)
theory of property.
 The personality theory provides an interesting
interpretation of why an author should have
control over the ways in which his or her work can
be displayed and distributed.
 To ensure this control, authors given protection
for their artistic work even if they have no legal
claim to any monetary reward associated with it.

FOSS Movement
 Collaboration of people who views software
ownership as a form that disregards the general
welfare of society and against it.
 As an alternative to this they proposes that
programmers work together to make software
freely available for humankind rather than
supporting efforts to restrict its use.
 GNU’s goal was to develop an entire Unix-like
operating system, complete with system utilities,
that was “open” and freely accessible.

Free Software
 Four “freedoms” are essential for free software.
 These include freedom to:
1. run the program, for any purpose;
2. study how the program works, and adapt it for your
needs;
3. redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor;
4. improve the program, and release your improvements
to the public so that the whole community benefits.
http://www.fsf.org : Visit web page of Free Software
Foundation and meet Richard M. Stallman, the man behind
the mindset.

GPL
 Free softwares typically accompanied by a
licensing agreement that is designed to keep it
freely available to other users “downstream,”
who can continue to modify the source code.
 The best known of these is the GNU Public License
(GPL). The kind of protection granted by this
license is also known as copyleft.

Copyleft
 Copyright law restrict the right to make and
redistribute copies of a particular work.
 Copyleft license included in GPL, uses an alternative
scheme that challenge the traditional copyright
mechanism in order to ensure that every person who
receives a copy, or derived version of a work, can
use, modify, and also redistribute both the work and
the derived version of the work.
 All derivative works of GPL software must also be
licensed under GPL.
 In this way, the four freedoms are propagated in
future software developments under this agreement.

Open Source Software
 The ability of a software user to look at,
understand, modify, and redistribute the source
code for that software.
 Requires that its source code be freely available.
 Concentrated its efforts more on promoting the
open source model as an alternative methodology
to “closed-source” development for software.
 Significant threat to companies that produce
proprietary software, such as Microsoft.

Free Software (FS)
Requires that all derivative
pieces of software be subject
to the original requirements
and thus remain “free” and
nonproprietary.
Requires that users must
strictly adhere to its GPL
license in all derivative uses of
its software.
Less anti-commercial
Open Source Software
(OSS)
More flexible with respect to
its derivative software.
Supports less restrictive
licenses Ex: Berkeley’s
Software Distribution (BSD)
and Netscape’s Mozilla Public
License (MPL) [These licenses
are considered more “light”
than GPL because they
permit programmers to alter
the open source software and
to release it as a proprietary
product.]
FOSS = Free Software + Open Source Software

Plagiarism
 “Stealing and publication" of another author's
"language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions" and the
representation of them as one's own original work.
 Plagiarism is considered academic dishonesty and a
breach of journalistic ethics.
 It is subject to sanctions like penalties, suspension,
and even expulsion.
 Plagiarism is not a crime as such, but in academia and
industry, it is a serious ethical offense and cases of
plagiarism can constitute copyright infringement.

Plagiarism
 Tools are becoming available to help identify
plagiarism.
 There are a range of approaches that attempt to
limit online copying(Content scraping), such as
disabling right clicking.
 Visit http://www.plagiarism.org

Common forms of student plagiarism
 Submitting someone’s work as their own.
 Taking passages from their own previous work without adding citations.
 Re-writing someone’s work without properly citing sources.
 Using quotations, but not citing the source.
 Interweaving various sources together in the work without citing.
 Citing some, but not all passages that should be cited.
 Melding together cited and uncited sections of the piece.
 Providing proper citations, but fails to change the structure and wording
of the borrowed ideas enough.
 Inaccurately citing the source.
 Relying too heavily on other people’s work. Fails to bring original thought
into the text.

Sharing and Caring Vs Intellectual Rights
 Consider the traditional practice of borrowing books
from public libraries. Physical books had always been
available in libraries and there is no limit on how
many times a book could circulate.
 In terms of the digital media content, does the same
practice suitable?
 Copyright laws, originally intended to cover print
media.
 For digital media it inhibit the distribution of
electronic information.
 The distribution of digitized information is now being
discouraged in some sectors.

 Copyright laws were originally designed to encourage
the flow of information in print media with a
protection, via their fair-use provisions.
 Yet, for digital media it have been discourages the
flow, and thus the sharing, of electronic information.
 Consider that the ability to share information
contributed to the development of the World Wide
Web.
 Also consider what might have happened if the
inventors of the Internet and the Web had been more
entrepreneurial-minded and less concerned with
sharing information.

e.g.: Tim Berners-Lee
 Tim Berners-Lee, who invented HTTP (the protocol
used on the Web), never bothered to apply for a
patent for his invention or for a copyright for his
programming code.
 As a physicist working at CERN (a physics laboratory
on the Franco-Swiss border), he desired to develop a
common protocol for Internet communication so that
scientists could share information more easily with
each other.
 Berners-Lee’s goal in developing the Web was to
provide a forum where information could be shared.

 A person whose interests were more
entrepreneurial could have sought intellectual
property protection for his or her contributions,
thereby reducing the amount of information that
could be shared.
 Consider also how the sharing of information has
benefited many of those entrepreneurs who now
seek to control the flow of information in
cyberspace.

e.g.: GUI
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp.)
 It has been argued that Microsoft benefited
significantly from the work done by Apple Corporation
on its graphical user interface (the system of icons
that users can point to and click on to accomplish a
task).
 And it is well known that when Steve Jobs was at
Apple, he visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research
Center), where he discovered that a graphical
interface had already been invented by researchers
there.
 So it is reasonably accurate to say that current user
interfaces have benefited from the sharing of
information along the way.

 Would it be fair to credit any one company or
person with exclusive rights to a graphical user
interface?
 Would doing so not also eliminate, or certainly
impede, the possibility of incremental
development and innovation?
 And more importantly, would it not also prevent
us from sharing that important information?

Building up Commons
 It is very easy to underestimate the importance of
the commons.
 We often take for granted the public parks, public
beaches, and public gathering places that have
been set aside for general use.
 Imagine the quality of our lives without them, and
consider that without proper foresight, planning,
and management, our parks could easily have
been turned over to entrepreneurs for private
development.

So How?
 If we defend the principle that information wants
to be shared (but not totally free), then perhaps
it will be possible to frame reasonable
intellectual property policies that would both
encourage the flow of information in digital form
and reward fairly the creators of intellectual
objects, including software manufacturers.

CC (http://creativecommons.org)
 One promising scheme for accomplishing these
objectives can be found in the kind of licensing
agreements currently issued in the Creative Commons
(CC) initiative.
 One of CC’s goals is to expand the range of creative
work available to others legally to build upon and
share.
 To accomplish this objective, CC provides a set of
licensing options that help artists and authors give
others the freedom and creativity to build upon their
creativity.

CC
 Such a “creative” scheme for licensing is needed
because many people now realize that the current
intellectual property rights regime does not make
sense in the digital world.
 Note that CC does not aim to undermine the
principle of copyright.
 CC provides a “middle ground” with respect to
copyright protection because it makes possible a
“some rights reserved” approach vs. an “all rights
reserved” policy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

Intellectual Property

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