Intellectual Property - CS Department - Home
Transcript of Intellectual Property - CS Department - Home
What is Intellectual Property?
Any unique product of the human intellect that has commercial value
Includes songs, movies, books, art, computer programs, video games, etc
Trademarks
A word, symbol, picture, or sound used to identify goods from a certain business
Some trademarks become generic (yo yo, asprin, escalator, etc.)
Copyrights
How the government provides an inventor with an exclusive right to a piece of intellectual property. Such rights include:
• Right to reproduce the copyrighted work• Right to distribute copies of the work to the public• Right to display copies of the work in public• Right to perform the work in public• Right to produce new works derived from the
copyrighted work
Copyrights
Copyright Act of 1976 explicitly recognized that software can be copyrighted
Copyright protects the expression of the idea, not the idea itself
Copyright protects the executable program, not the source program
Patents
U.S. Government's way of providing an inventor with an exclusive right to a piece of intellectual property
Patents are in the public domain and provide detailed descriptions of the inventions
Apple's patent for cover flow
Patents
Patents expire 20 years after the filing date Software patents didn't exist until 1981
− Diamond v. Diehr – Supreme Court ruled that an invention related to curing rubber could be patented though the principal innovation was using a computer to control the heating.
Software can only be patented if it manipulates data representing values in the real world
Trade Secrets
Confidential piece of intellectual property that provides a company with a competitive advantage
Trade secrets never become public domain Companies can treat source code as a trade
secret
Fair Use
When circumstances allow the reproduction of a copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder (cited excerpts, news reports, etc)
Fair Use
Commercial nature vs non-profit educational purposes, Preamble purposes (criticism, comment, reporting,
teaching, research), Degree of transformation
Fair Use
Amount taken Quality of utilized work Ratio of amount taken to utilizing work (no more taken
than necessary)
Audio Home Recording Act of 1992
Protects the rights of consumers to make copies of analog or digital recordings for personal, non-commercial use
No Electronic Theft Act 1994 – MIT student named
David LaMacchia posted copyrighted software on a public bulletin board on a university computer
Prosecutors were forced to drop charges because the programs were available for free
Congress passes act to make it a criminal offense to reproduce or distribute more than $1000 worth of copyrighted material in a six month period
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Illegal for users to circumvent encryption schemes
Illegal to sell software programs designed to circumvent copyright controls
Online service providers that misuse copyrighted material face penalties
Extends copyright protection to music broadcast over the internet
Digital Rights Management
Any actions that owners of intellectual property may take to protect their work
xkcd.com
DRM Example: Sony BMG Music Entertainment
2005 – Sony ships millions of CDs with Extended Copy Protection
ECP prevented users from ripping audio tracks into MP3 format and monitored user listening habits by installing a rootkit when the CD was first played
Sony forced to cease production, make a patch available to uninstall the rootkit, allow customers to exchange their CDs, and offer $7.50 or 3 free album downloads for every CD with ECP that was exchanged
DRM: Copyproof CDs
PC CD drives use yellow book standards and will reread a block of bad bits until the data appears to be correct
Audio CD players use red book standards and skip an bad bits they encounter
Companies deliberately plant bad blocks of data to prevent computers from reading the CD
Midbar Tech's Cactus Data Shield, Sony's key2audio, SunnComm's MediaCloq
DRM Criticism
Technology is bound to fail Can undermine the principle of fair use Restrictions sometimes prevent libraries from
reformatting materials to make them accessible to people with disabilities
Can prevent people from anonymously accessing content
− Windows Media Player has an embedded globally unique identifier and keeps track of the content the user views.
Open Source
• There are no restrictions preventing others from selling or giving away the software
• The source code to the program must be included in the distribution or easily available by other means
• There are no restrictions preventing people from modifying the source code, and derived works can be distributed according to the same license terms as the original program
Open Source
• There are no restrictions regarding how people can use the software
• These rights apply to everyone receiving redistributions of the software without the need for additional licensing agreements
• The license cannot put restrictions on other software that is part of the same distribution (a program's open source license cannot require all other programs on a CD to be open source)
Benefits of Open Source
Gives people the opportunity to improve the program
New versions appear much more frequently Eliminates tension between obeying copyright
law and helping others Programs are the property of the user
community Shifts focus from manufacturing to service
Criticisms of Open Source
If the project doesn't attract many developers, the overall quality of the software can be poor
There is a possibility that different groups of users will independently make enhancements to a product that are incompatible with each other
Tend to have relatively weak GUIs Poor mechanism for stimulating innovation.
Companies develop new products because they are financially rewarded for them
Peer to Peer
Definition: transient network allowing computers running the same networking program to connect with each other and access files stored on each others' hard drives
Peer to Peer: RIAA Lawsuits
2003 – RIAA warned users of KaZaA and Grokster that there would be legalpenalties imposed for swapping copyrighted music files
RIAA identified the IP addresses of the most active KaZaA supernodes and subpoenaed Verizon, asking it to identify the names of the customers running the nodes.
Verizon was ordered by a judge in Washington DC to release the names
Peer to Peer: RIAA Lawsuit
RIAA sued 261 people for distributing copyrighted music and sent letters to 204 more who had downloaded over 1000 music files and gave them the option to settle before going to court
Lawsuits were setback when the Supreme Court ruled that Verizon didn't need to respond to the subpoenas of the RIAA
Peer to Peer: MP3 Spoofing
Recording industry wants to make downloading mp3s from peer to peer networks unreliable
Overpeer is responsible for posting spoofs of over 30,000 songs, games, and videos on P2P networks
Spoofs contain defects like an annoying noise or repetition of a part of the song
Locke's Theory of Property Rights
• People have a right to property in their own person
• People have a right to their own labor• People have a right to those things that they
have removed from Nature through their own labor
Locke's Theory of Property Rights
Locke's Theory was developed for physical objects, paradoxes occur when applied to intellectual property
What if two people have the same idea independently?
What happens if intellectual property is copied?
Utilitarian View Based on a chain of consequences • Copying software results in lost sales
– Reduced sales result in a decline in the industry
• A decline in the industry will result in fewer products
– Fewer products means fewer benefits for society
• Software copying is wrong
Conclusion
Dealing with the protection of intellectual property is still something we are working on. We have yet to come up with a viable solution for protecting IPs and it is hard to make laws for something that isn't tangible. The effects of piracy are very hard to quantify and current DRM solutions can cause more harm than good.