Ethics in Information

Technology, Fourth Edition

Chapter 6
Intellectual Property
 Patents
• Grant of property right to inventors
• Issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
(USPTO)
• Permits an owner to exclude the public from
making, using, or selling the protected invention
• Allows legal action against violators
• Prevents independent creation as well as copying
• Extends only to the United States and its territories
and possessions

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 Patents (cont’d.)
• Applicant must file with the USPTO
– USPTO searches prior art
– Takes an average of 35.3 months from filing an
application until application is issued as a patent or
abandoned
• Prior art
– Existing body of knowledge
– Available to a person of ordinary skill in the art

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 Patents (cont’d.)
• An invention must pass four tests
– Must be in one of the five statutory classes of items
– Must be useful
– Must be novel
– Must not be obvious to a person having ordinary skill
in the same field
• Items cannot be patented if they are:
– Abstract ideas
– Laws of nature
– Natural phenomena
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 Patents (cont’d.)
• Patent infringement
– Making unauthorized use of another’s patent
– No specified limit to the monetary penalty
• Software patent
– Protects feature, function, or process embodied in
instructions executed on a computer
• 20,000 software-related patents per year have
been issued since the early 1980s
• Some experts think the number of software patents
being granted inhibits new software development
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 Patents (cont’d.)
• Before obtaining a software patent, do a patent
search
• Software Patent Institute is building a database of
information
• Software cross-licensing agreements
– Large software companies agree not to sue each
other over patent infringements
– Small businesses have no choice but to license
patents if they use them
• Average patent lawsuit costs $3 - $10 million

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 Patents (cont’d.)
• Defensive publishing
– Alternative to filing for patents
– Company publishes a description of the innovation
– Establishes the idea’s legal existence as prior art
– Costs mere hundreds of dollars
– No lawyers
– Fast
• Patent troll firm
– Acquires patents with no intention of manufacturing
anything; instead, licensing the patents to others

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 Patents (cont’d.)
• Standard is a definition or format
– Approved by recognized standards organization or
accepted as a de facto standard by the industry
– Enables hardware and software from different
manufacturers to work together
• Submarine patent
– Patented process/invention hidden within a standard
– Does not surface until standard is broadly adopted

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 Patents (cont’d.)
• Patent farming involves:
– Influencing a standards organization to make use of
a patented item without revealing the existence of
the patent
– Demanding royalties from all parties that use the
standard

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 Trade Secrets
• Trade secret
– Business information
– Represents something of economic value
– Requires an effort or cost to develop
– Some degree of uniqueness or novelty
– Generally unknown to the public
– Kept confidential
• Information is only considered a trade secret if the
company takes steps to protect it

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 Trade Secrets (cont’d.)
• Trade secret law has a few key advantages over
patents and copyrights
– No time limitations
– No need to file an application
– Patents can be ruled invalid by courts
– No filing or application fees
• Law doesn’t prevent someone from using the same
idea if it is developed independently
• Trade secret law varies greatly from country to
country

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 Trade Secret Laws
• Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA)
– Established uniformity across the states in area of
trade secret law
– Computer hardware and software can qualify for
trade secret protection
• The Economic Espionage Act (EEA) of 1996
– Penalties of up to $10 million and 15 years in prison
for the theft of trade secrets

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 Employees and Trade Secrets
• Employees are the greatest threat to trade secrets
• Unauthorized use of an employer’s customer list
– Customer list is not automatically considered a trade
secret
– Educate workers about the confidentiality of lists
• Nondisclosure clauses in employee’s contract
– Enforcement can be difficult
– Confidentiality issues are reviewed at the exit
interview

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 Employees and Trade Secrets
(cont’d.)
• Noncompete agreements
– Protect intellectual property from being used by
competitors when key employees leave
– Require employees not to work for competitors for a
period of time
– Wide range of treatment on noncompete
agreements among the various states

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 Key Intellectual Property Issues
• Issues that apply to intellectual property and
information technology
– Plagiarism
– Reverse engineering
– Open source code
– Competitive intelligence
– Trademark infringement
– Cybersquatting

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 Plagiarism
• Stealing someone’s ideas or words and passing
them off as one’s own
• Many students:
– Do not understand what constitutes plagiarism
– Believe that all electronic content is in the public
domain
• Plagiarism is also common outside academia
• Plagiarism detection systems
– Check submitted material against databases of
electronic content
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