Protecting Intellectual Property

Protection of digital Intellectual Property (IP) is a vital part of our modern infrastructure/economy. Protecting IP gives an incentive to the creators to do what they are good at: Inventing. Intellectual Property Rights also helps in recovering the costs associated when creating a new technology as well as any profits for continuous investments. What is IPR? “IPR refers to the legal rights given to the inventor or creator to protect his invention or creation for a certain period of time.” (1)

With the advancement of technology, opportunities are arising for businesses to develop and share their inventions around the world. The gap between production and customers is shortening. Consumers can access digital products near instantly. Business can receive payments instantly through online payment systems. This seamless interconnection between manufacturers and consumers is possible because of new tools and software, such as payment systems, being invented.

Why is protecting Intellectual Rights important? Criminals exploit these new technologies by selling counterfeit and pirated products. These can have significant effect on economic value of the products, as well as waste the time, effort, and money spent of creating these products. Businesses lose sales; Creator/Inventors lose incentives to create; Consumers use poor quality products, which in turn negatively impacts on brand value of businesses. (2 2)

There are many ways to protect an intellectual property, one such way is Copyright. Copyright law was created to encourage the innovation and creation of creative works by providing a legal boundary around the right to copy and reproduce the copyrighted product. "Copyright relates to expression of ideas in material form and includes literary, musical, dramatic, artistic, cinematography work, audio tapes, and computer software." (1)

In the industry of Computer Software, when a code is in tangible form, it is automatically under the protection of copyright. Which means that the creator automatically has the ownership of the code, and only by the permission of the creator can anyone copy, reproduce, distribute, and or produce derivative work. (3) Even though, the code is automatically copyrighted. It is still very important and beneficial to register the code to U.S. Copyright Office. As a lawsuit cannot be filed if the work is not registered with the U.S Copyright Office.

References:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3217699/
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-ccips/legacy/2015/03/26/prosecuting_ip_crimes_manual_2013.pdf
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/software/
Featured Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

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