Week 2 Project

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Property Rights

Online piracy is the unauthorized uploading of a copyrighted sound recording and making it available to the public, or downloading a sound

recording from an internet site, even if the recording isn't resold. Online piracy may now also include certain uses of "streaming" technologies from

the internet. — Recording industry Association of America

Contemporary IS threatens intellectual property, trade secrets, copyrights, and patents by infringement on the creativity and innovation of the original resource, whether that resource is owned by government, corporations, or individuals. Intellectual property is an intangible property created by individuals or corporations that is subject to protection under trade secret, copyright, and patent law.

A trade secret is an intellectual work or product used for business. This can be classi�ed as belonging to that business, provided it is not based on information in the public domain. This is why Microsoft waited to buy FoxPro until after the lawsuit between Borland and Ashton Tate was resolved. This action of Microsoft proved that the dBase format was in the public domain at California Institute of Technology before Ashton Tate developed the dBase software development product for the PC-DOS platform.

A copyright is a statutory grant that protects the creators of intellectual property against copying by others for any purpose during the life of the author plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death.

A patent is a legal document that grants the owner an exclusive monopoly on the concepts behind an invention for 20 years. It ensures that inventors of new machines or methods are rewarded for their labor, making their inventions widely available. In 1998 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit began allowing business method patents, a type of invention not patentable earlier. With the growth of the Internet and e-commerce, real-world and dot com companies rushed to patent all types of business models and methods for conducting business over the Internet. The different e-commerce patents consist of business methods and software patents and are of great concern to entrepreneurs and small businesses that pay royalties for using these patents.