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As stated by the author “Copyright is how the U. S. Government provides authors with certain rights to original works that they have written. ” Quinn. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, while it may protect the way these things are expressed. Copyright protects original works of authorship. Trade Secrets Trade Secret is any valuable commercial, information that provides a business with an advantage over competitors who do not have that information.
According to eating “a trade secret is a confidential piece of intellectual property that provides a company with a competitive advantage. ” In general terms trade secrets include inventions, ideas, or compilations of data that are used by business to make it more successful. Specifically, trade secrets include any useful formula, plan, pattern, process, program, tool, technique, mechanism, compound, or device that is not generally known or obtainable by the public. Whatever type of information is represented by a trade secret, a business must take reasonable steps to safeguard it from disclosure.
Patents A patent grants an inventor exclusive rights to make, use, sell, and import an invention for a limited period of time, in exchange for the public disclosure of the invention. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem, which may be a product or a process. A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a state too patent holder for a limited period of time, usually 20 years. These rights are granted to patent applicants in exchange for their disclosure of the inventions.
Once a patent is granted in a given country, no person may make, use, sell or import/ sport the claimed invention in that country without the permission of the patent holder. Permission, where granted, is typically in the form of a license which conditions are set by the patent owner: it may be gratis or in return for a royalty payment or lump sum fee. As it relates to software, A software patent has been defined by the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (IF) as being a “patent on any performance of a computer realized by means of computer program”. 2) The owner of a copyright has five (5) principle rights. What are they? The Copyright Act grants five rights to a copyright owner, they are as follows: (1) the right to reproduce the copyrighted work (2) the right to prepare derivative works based upon the work (3) the right to distribute copies of the work to the public (4) the right to perform the copyrighted work publicly (5) the right to display the copyrighted work publicly. (3) Discuss the legal protections related to copyright, trade secrecy, and patents.
Include an example for each where legal protection has been enforced. The laws protecting intellectual property in the United States exist at both the state ND federal levels. State laws cover a broad range of intellectual property fields, from trade secrets to the right of publicity. The laws vary somewhat from state to state. At the federal level, the Constitution and legislation approved under the Constitution deal exclusively with patents and copyrights, and partially with trademarks and related areas of unfair competition.
Intellectual property protection first became an important issue at an international level during trade and tariff negotiations in the nineteenth century, and has remained so ever since. One of the first international treaties relating to intellectual property in the broadest sense was the International Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, or the Paris Convention. Written in 1883, the treaty created under the Paris Convention provided protection for such properties as patents, industrial models and designs, trademarks, and trade names.
Over 100 countries have signed the Paris Convention treaty, and it has been modified several times. Two of the most important provisions of the treaty relate to the rights of national treatment and priority. An example of legal protections as it relates to copyrights: the copyright to a Mackey Mouse cartoon restricts others from making copies of the cartoon or creating derivative works based on Disney’s particular anthropomorphic mouse, but does not exclude the formation of other works about anthropomorphic mice in general, so long as they are different enough to not be Judged copies of Disney’s.
An example of legal protections as it relates to trade secrecy: Coca-Cola, for example, has no patent for its formula and has been very effective in protecting it for many ore years than the twenty years of protection that a patent would have provided. In fact, Coca-Cola refused to reveal its trade secret under at least two Judges’ orders. The disadvantage is that there is no protection once information protected as trade secret is uncovered by others through reverse engineering, for example, whereas patent has a guaranteed time of protection in exchange for disclosing the information to the public.