CS73N IP protection
Assembled by Gio Wiederhold form earlier notes, 23 May 2006.
For a definition of intellectual Property (IP) see [I Pnote]
From Notes02 (2006)
Intellectual property (IP) is what most Internet commerce is based on, and it has become the largest fraction of business, medicine, and goverment overall. Of course, education is all about IP, even though the IP is not protected, and is not formally property. What a professor writes however, even during university hours, is tradtionally regarded as personal intellectual property. But if a professor writes software, that is considered University property at Stanford, and there is a rule about sharing income after cost: 1/3 to the university, 1/3 to the department, and 1/3 to the author. Is that fair?.
IP is also what this class will produce. We also hope to make our students smarter, but that is a very difficult intangeable to measure.
A related issue is unauthorized downloading intellectual property –as Music and Movies. This is a very hard problem where expectaions that everything on tyhe Internet should be free is in conflict with expectations of authors and musicians that they deserve some income for their creations. I don't want to make this issue a topic for this class unless you have a solution for the problem.
There are three principal methods:
- Patents: protect inventions of new goods and methods for creating for manufacture
- Copyright: protects literal expressions as writing, music, and software
- Trade Secret: protects anything you agree not to talk about
We just provide a simple summary, adequate for CS73N students. Much has been written and is available on the web for further study
Patents:
Are formally protected for 20 years after you obtain a patent from the United States Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO). Yes, trademarks are another form of intellectual property that can be protected. A patent has to be formally described, and once it is granted (that takes about 18 months), it is published. Patent examiners at the USPTO investigate the description to assure that a new patent is indeed novel and at the same time non-obvious. They rely heavily on searching for prior patents. In a new field such as computer science, it is easy to make errors, and grant a patent for apparent inventions that were actually known to specialists, but not patented, and not published widely, or published using different terminology.
Non-obvious pertains to people `versed in the state of the art', ie., specialists. For a long time computer scientists, not having been trained under engineering school accreditation rules, were not eligible to become patent examiners, so that the patent office had few people`versed in the state of the art'.
Once a patent is published, the world knows about your invention. You can exploit it, and sue folks that use your invention without your permission. If you win a patent suit, you can enjoin them from using your patent, or extract a license fee or ongoing license royalties.
Patent trolls are companies that collect patents that were granted, but not exploited, and then sue companies that appear to be using technology covered in their patents. Since defending against a granted patent is very costly, companies often settle with patent trolls. Failure to win or settle will disable a company and dry up funding from investors.
Copyright
You now own the copyright to anything that you write and publish. To indicate your intent you can place a note © copyright CS73Nclass 2006 on the material. While copyright focuses on the literal representation, it also covers changes of format, as MS Word to HTML, translations into other languages, and for software translation into other languages and computers. The length of time that a copyright protects a work has been steady increasing, see among others, the so-called Sonnny Bono Digital Millenium Act.
Special rules exist for images of well-known personalities, including Mickey Mouse, works-of-art, and images of them, as prints of the Mona Lisa, etc. There some amazing exceptions, as music performances are covered, except when performed in Veterans Adminstration hospitals.
Copyright can protect collections, as an anthology, even though all the chapters of an anthology have their own copyright as well.
Nobody is supposed to copy and publish copyrighted without your permission, except for so called `fair use'. If you wish to be generous, you can place a note on your web pages, as I have for many of my pages ' Permission to copy is granted, as long as the origin is cited".
If you wish to protect yourself better, you can register your work with the Copyrights Office of the Library of Congress. That will validate the date of creation and can be useful in case of serious disputes. For software you can chose to register just a part of your code, enough to uniquely identify it, but not enough so that someone can steal and productively use it.
The `Fair use' doctrine allows use of excerpts and quotations in criticsm and academic study. Its boundaries are still a subject of debate.
Trade Secret
Keeping a trade secret while using it requires cooperation from everyone involved. Employees in companies that rely on trade secrets have to sign `Non-disclosure Agreements', (NDAs), certifying that they will comply, and may be sued if they reveal the secret.
What type of IP is appropriate when?
Who is hurt when trade secrets / patents/copyrights are violated? How can damage be recovered?
Typically the owner of the IP will lose income when protected IP is made accessible to others without pay. If you write great software, you may wish to sell it, but if it becomes public, you can't get much from it. Here copyright affords some protection, a patent is only useful if the software embodies a an orginal idea or algorithm. But the algortithm itself is not patentable, it represents a discovery, not an invention. Academic authors often do not care if thir work is copied, because the income from academic publications, other than popular textbooks is minimal, and additional exposure can add to fame. Only the publishers may lose.
To defend IP you typically have to go to court. The process is costly, slow, and risky. A jury may not understand complex technicalities, and prefer the most sympathetic party. The delay may be so long that the value of your novel work will have diminished to the extent that it is not worth fighting over it anyhow.
Patents and coyrights protect fairly well against the most obvious infringements.
If you invent a better mousetrap and patent it, and some else makes and markets a mousetrap that is covered by your patent description, the case should be straightforward. The job of the patent lawyer you hired to write the description of your invention is to write it sufficiently general so that any mousetrap that embodies your novel concept is covered. It should not state that you use, say, a wooden base, if that is not essential, since a competitor might use a plastic base, and hence not infringe. At the same time, the patent should not be so general that it covers mousetraps already in existence or patented, since now your patent can be challenged and ruled invalid.
Violations of copyright are mainly prosecuted if you make a profit from selling copies, or avoid paying for copies in your possession. The latter case is akin to theft, so that other legal rules can apply.
Since the information covered by patents and copyrights is public, they do not protect use of the material within a closed setting, say another company. Only when such a company produces and brings on the market a good that appears to violate a patent or copyright can action be taken.
Because of that limitation of access to internal use, in the fast moving Internet world, trade secrets are actually the prime means of IP protection. Only if you cannot avoid showing your work to the public is patent or copyright protection called for.
Keeping software on servers, and just charging for its use or deriving income from sponsors or advertisers makes copying of the software hard, and the underlying algorithms hard to discern. Protection by trade secret is the dominant approach here as well.
See work of Libraries , CS99I class notes.
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