Information Technology: Trade Secrets

• Ethics in Information Technology is studied in the Third Year of Computer Science at the University of Computer Studies, Pathein.

Intellectual Property

• Intellectual property can be protected by Copyrights, Patents or kept as Trade Secrets.

Trade Secrets

• A trade secret includes business information that represents economic value and requires development effort or cost.
• Trade secrets have some degree of uniqueness or novelty and are generally unknown to the public.
• Information is only considered a trade secret if the company takes steps to protect it and keeps it confidential.
• Trade secret law has some key advantages over patents and copyrights, with no time limitations and no need to file an application.
• Under trade secret law, patents can be ruled invalid by courts without filing or application fees.
• Legal protection does not prevent someone from using the same idea if it is developed independently.
• Trade secret law varies greatly from country to country.
• Employees are the greatest threat to trade secrets, especially unauthorized use of an employer's customer list.
• Customer lists are not automatically considered a trade secret, so workers should be educated about the confidentiality of lists.
• Nondisclosure clauses in employee contracts can help protect trade secrets.
• Enforcement of nondisclosure clauses can be difficult, so confidentiality issues are often reviewed at the exit interview.
• Noncompeting agreements can protect intellectual property from being used by competitors when key employees leave.
• Noncompeting agreements may require employees not to work for competitors for a period of time.
• Treatment of noncompeting agreements varies among states.

Key Intellectual Property Issues

• Plagiarism, reverse engineering, open source code, competitive intelligence, trademark infringement, and cybersquatting apply to intellectual property and IT.

Plagiarism

• Plagiarism is stealing someone’s ideas or words and passing them off as one’s own.
• Many students do not understand what constitutes plagiarism, and 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.
• Steps to combat student plagiarism include teaching students what constitutes plagiarism and why they need to cite sources.
• Showing students how to document Web pages and scheduling major writing assignments in portions due over the course of the term further prevents plagiarism.
• Informing students that instructors are aware of Internet paper mills and plagiarism detection services also helps prevent it.
• Incorporation of plagiarism detection into an antiplagiarism program is essential.

Reverse Engineering

• Reverse engineering takes something apart to understand, copy, or improve it.
• Reverse engineering principles can be applied to computer hardware and software.
• Reverse engineering can convert a program code to a higher-level design, or an app from one vendor’s database to run on another’s.
• A compiler is a language translator that converts computer program statements expressed in a source language to machine language.
• Software manufacturers provide software in machine language form,
• A decompiler reads machine language and produces source code.
• Courts have ruled in favor of reverse engineering to enable interoperability.
• Software license agreements may forbid reverse engineering.
• The ethics of using reverse engineering are debated and considered fair when providing useful function/interoperability.
• Reverse engineering may uncover designs that someone else has developed at great cost and taken care to protect.

Open Source Code

• Program source code is made available for use or modification by users and other developers.
• The basic premise is that many programmers can help software improve and adapt to meet new needs.
• When the code is open, bugs are rapidly identified and fixed, resulting in high reliability.
• The GNU General Public License (GPL) was a precursor to the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

Competitive Intelligence

• Competitive intelligence involves gathering legally obtainable information to help a company gain an advantage over rivals.
• It is often integrated into a company’s strategic plans and decision making.
• It's not the same as being an industrial spy who uses illegal means to obtain business information not available to the general public.
• Without proper management safeguards, it can cross over to industrial spy.

Trademark Infringement

• A trademark is a logo, package design, phrase, sound, or word that enables consumers to differentiate products from one company to another.
• A trademark owner can prevent others from using the same mark or a confusingly similar mark on a product’s label.
• Organizations frequently sue one another over the use of a trademark in a Web site or domain name.
• Nominative fair use is a defense often employed by defendants in trademark infringement cases.

Cybersquatting

• Cyber squatters register domain names for famous trademarks or company names.

• They hope the trademark’s owner will buy the domain name for a large sum of money.

• To curb cybersquatting, it's recommended to register all possible domain names, like .org, .com, .info.

• The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages several top-level domains including .com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, .org, aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .pro, .asis, .cat, .mobi, .tel, and .travel.

• Current trademark holders have a time to assert their rights in the new top-level domains before registrations are opened to the general public.

• The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act allows trademark owners to challenge foreign cyber squatters.