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. (22)
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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