Abstract
This chapter discusses intellectual property including patents, copyrights and trademarks. Intellectual property law deals with the rules that apply in protecting inventions, designs and artistic work, and in enforcing such rights. Patents protect innovative ideas and concepts, and give inventors exclusive rights to their invention for a specified period or time. A copyright applies to original writing, music, and other original intellectual and artistic expressions. It protects the expression of the idea and not the underlying idea itself. A trademark protects names or symbols that are used to identify goods or services, and their purpose is to avoid confusion and to help customers distinguish one brand from another.
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Notes
- 1.
It is a grey area on whether it is legal to use reverse engineering to try to discover the trade secret.
- 2.
The invention must not have been publicly disclosed to the public (e.g., described in a publication or presented at a conference).
- 3.
Prior art refers to the existing state of knowledge of a field.
- 4.
This may be a provisional application: i.e., it does not need to be a formal application.
- 5.
The decision may be to put the invention in the public domain with a defensive publication thereby preventing competitors from filing a patent for the invention. The costs of filing a formal patent application may be up to $100 k.
- 6.
The ABC was ruled to be the first electronic digital computer in the Sperry Rand versus Honeywell patent case in 1973. However, Zuse’s Z3 computer preceded it (as it was completed in 1941 whereas the ABC became operational in 1942).
- 7.
Sperry (later called Unisys) was one of the earliest computer companies and it was the successor to EMCC that was founded by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly (the designers of ENIAC and EDVAC in the mid-1940s). Honeywell Information Systems was founded in the mid-1950s.
- 8.
Another example of the digitalisation of content that benefited the Internet platforms rather than the content providers is the Google book project where Google intended that all the books in the world would be presented free on its platform. The book publishers and Google reached a financial settlement that gave the publishers a tiny financial payment compared to the revenue that Google gained from advertisers in becoming a massive digital bookstore where users could search for content. There was no benefit to authors and the benefits to the publishers were minimal. The publishers did not really understand Google’s business model at the time, where Google’s approach to the commodification of content led to the transfer of wealth from the content creators to the Google platform.
- 9.
Xerox PARC’s inventions have had a significant influence on developments in the computing field. However, Xerox has been criticized for failing to properly exploit its inventions, as other companies have reaped the benefits of its research. For example, the Xerox 8010 Star, its commercialisation of the Xerox Alto personal computer, was released in 1981 but it was not very successful due mainly to its high price of $16,000. Instead, it was Apple that reaped the benefits of PARC’s research in personal computing, when it introduced the Apple Macintosh. This machine was a revolution in the computing field with its bitmap display and mouse driven graphical user interface, and these were copied from the existing Xerox Alto. The Apple Macintosh was an immediate success following its release in 1984.
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O’Regan, G. (2024). Intellectual Property Law. In: Ethical and Legal Aspects of Computing. Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52664-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52664-0_10
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