Privacy and Property Laws in IT - Essay Example

IT Ethics assignment PROPERTY RIGHTS: PIRACY/ INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Piracy is an issue that most software companies fight each and everyday. Media always report on the piracy issues. Intellectual property law and practises that are used for protection of intellectual information against piracy and copyright infringement in the error of information technology has been challenged. Intellectual properties are properties that can not touched, they are ideas or works stored on the on the media devices. With information technology, it is becoming very hard each day as information technology advances to protect intellectual property sophisticated tools are being avail via he internet which facilitates copying and distribute them easily. There are many websites that provide materials to download for free without considering the legal implication of getting them for free. In 2010, police in Australia carried out piracy raids where homes and various businesses were searched and properties worthy millions of dollars were inbounded. Some properties found include pirated music, DVDs and Microsoft software. According Smith said Microsoft seeks to "reduce the piracy and counterfeiting of software, Piracy is a very real problem”. Various film makers and other companies like Microsoft depend on the sales to get their money back hence piracy kills the industry. Intellectual property can be protected either under; Trade Secrets, Copyright, and Patent. Trade Secretes A trade secret can be said to be an information that a company should not disclose to the general public. This can be a methods or formula used in designing their products, for it to be a trade secrete the information should not have been known by the public. A trade secret law gives exclusive rights to the inventor for their labour; in essences the law protects actual ideas in work product. Software with novel or unique features, procedures and compilation can be classified as trade secret hence they can be protected under this law. The employees and customers are supposed to make a binding agreement to prevent the ideas from being disclosed into public domain. Copyright Copyright is an piracy law that protects authors of the intellectual property from having their work copied by others; the law protects the author’s work when they are still alive and 70 years after they die. The law protects original works of an author. The person with work that needs to be copyrighted presents the work to the attorney office. The issues of breaching this law have been reported to be on the rise recently. In Russia the police used the ant-piracy law to confiscate and harass the nongovernmental organization. According to Microsoft it was not a right way of dealing with the piracy issues, the company admits that the piracy issue is critical and needed to be solved(www.smh.com.au, 2010). Which way to fight piracy Patent Original and innovative ideas and works are protected under this law where they have exclusive rights to ideas they invented for a period of twenty years. The patent is obtained from the Patent office and it relies on court ruling. It was meant to help inventors have financial and other rewards of their work, they were to provide details of the inventory for others to use under the license from the Patent’s owner. Originality, novelty and invention are the key concepts that the Patent office evaluates before patent the works, if several people claims an invention the Patent Office only provides a protection to the one who invented first. Computer hardware and software can now be patented after the 1981 where the computer programs were also includes in the patent process. The advantage of this law is that it gives exclusive rights to the ideas and concepts of the software. The process of patenting is complex where the person who want to patent the material must prove that he/she is the author of the idea where innovation, originality must be demonstrated. Some of the challenges posed by IT include easy to copy or duplicate and redistribute patent materials or works leading to thorny ethical, social and political issues. It is easier to copy, transmit and alter digital media compared to physical materials like books, periodicals or even newspapers hence it is hard to classify software work as a book, a program or music this makes theft easy and hard to establish the uniqueness factors in software. The internet has made complicated the issue of protecting intellectual property. Before the internet error came in the copies of software, books and other intellectual information were stored on a computer disks which made it difficult to be accessed and replicated. With the network around it is easy to transmit and replicate information in which is digital format. From the reported cases in the news papers like in Russia and Australia the courts have been tackling piracy issues using the anti-piracy issues. The drawbacks come in on how to carry out the crack down on pirated materials without violating human rights, according to an article in the newspaper, where police did a crack down in Russia Microsoft condemned the event that police did which was a violation of human rights (www.smh.com.au, 2010). Given that many homes are now adapting high speed internet access; there will be more sharing videos which poses serious threat to the film industry. You-tube, urgrove, media fire, realfiles are examples of sites where videos are shared without considering the copyrights. There are efforts by various governments, organizations to fight against piracy. Several countries have set up anti-piracy laws for instance Russia uses the anti-piracy laws to crack down pirated material. There are issues that arise in the process which best way can they do without cross-violation of human rights. There are efforts to curb against the Information technologies challenges posed in the intellectual property protection. In 1998, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was established with a sole purpose of protecting copyrighted materials. The law requires that internet service providers and web hosting companies to enforce strict policies where the clients hosting materials or sites that are promoting piracy and other copyright infringement activities should banned. Accountability, liability and control are also some of the challenging issues while dealing with privacy and property laws in IT. Who should be held responsible if a machine controlled by a software having malfunction. For instance the “Robot killer” case where the operator died due to injuries caused by a robot, who should be held responsible? Is it the programmers, the operator or the organization where the product was manufactured? References Microsoft condemns use of anti-piracy laws to stifle dissent http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/microsoft-condemns-use-of-antipiracy-laws-to-stifle-dissent-20100914-159rd.html Police launch biggest piracy raid in history http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/police-launch-biggest-piracy-raid-in-history-20100915-15byt.html Swiss Top Court on Anti-P2P: Collecting IP Addresses is Invasion of Privacy http://www.zeropaid.com/news/90602/swiss-top-court-on-anti-p2p-collecting-ip-addresses-is-invasion-of-privacy/ Cor blimey! British ISPs must fund P2P copyright crackdown http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/should-isps-pay-for-p2p-warning-letters-uk-says-yes.ars Read More