Thursday, April 5, 2012

Copyright, Patent and Trademark


Introduction

Protection for software has increased in the past fifteen years; however to what extent it is protected varies from country to country as well the implementation of   the protection differ by country. Intellectual property gives the right for the owner of trademark, patent or copyright to benefit from his creation, Intellectual property is the creative work which is protected by law and gives the creator financial benefits, this is a human right and its important to encourage creative people to come up with new creative things that benefit the society. Without Intellectual property protection, people will not be credited for their creativity and achievements. Still, laws and regulations alone are not enough to protect computer software from piracy; awareness and enforcement of the law should exist to protect intellectual property.

As software became a very important part of the information age and is being used everywhere and by everyone, creative people who develop that software should be given the right to benefit from their creation, as its their Intellectual Property.

I Strongly believe that the cost of registration for trademarks and patents should be minimal, to allow every creative person to benefit from his creation, and to eliminate the possibly of big companies harming small companies or individuals by taking their invention, just because they couldn’t pay the registration fees. As well, if we reach a level were trademark, patent and copyright laws are unified worldwide; software piracy will decrease, especially by showing developing countries the benefit they get by forcing such laws. In my region there is no public awareness of the benefits of these laws, in addition to that being member of a developing country, I used to believe that all these laws were set to protect the developed countries trades in our region. 

 
Copyright

Copyright in general is a power given to the author or creator that allows only him to copy, duplicate, distribute or change the work. Copyright “protects the expression of the idea, but not the idea itself” (Adams & Mccrindle, 2008); it is a legalized monopoly to allow the owner to benefit from his work for a period of time. The creator can transfer this right to others.

Copyright law came to disallow unauthorized copy of protected materials, computer software is one of items that are covered under copyright law, its easy for tangible items like book to be detected if copied, however with computer devices and Internet it became more challenging to detect a copy of software program or media file, in early days computer were so expensive that software development cost were not mentioned, but by time, computer software became complex and larger, it became noticed as isolated from computer hardware.

Software copyright became protected in all countries, however, not all countries enforce it, for example, when I was doing my under graduate studies in Jordan, I bought my first PC, it’s hard disk were loaded with copies of software binaries and installed software that I didn’t purchase, it was the trend as incentive from the shop for buying this peace of hardware, we never learned the importance of Intellectual property and never understood its impact on the economy of our country and the whole world. Jordan started to fight software piracy and its current copyright law, which was amended multiple times in the recent years to cope with the development in this field, protects software against piracy and issues fines and penalties against infringement, to protect Jordanian developers, as well to maintain international relationship with software exporters like the United States. (Al Sharari, 2006)


Patent

Patent in general is given for any work that is proved to be novel and non-obvious, by that the creator for this work is given a monopoly for the production of the creation. This monopoly is governed to encourage “the progress of science and Useful Arts” (Adams & McCrindle, 2008).
Patents unlike copyright are not approved under laws in all countries; in the states they allow software to be patented however in EU only lesser portion of software is patentable (Adams & McCrindle, 2008). The patent is given for a limited period of time, which varies between countries and laws. During this period of time, no one other than the person who has registered the patent is allowed to sell, import or make the invention even if they prove that they came up with it by themselves. However, an enhancement to the patent can be developed, but cannot be sold or made without the right to use from the holder of the original patent, and vise versa. Software patents were and still one of the areas that is not approved and accepted by all countries.

The reason why software patents is not recognized in the whole world relies in the fact that technology moves fast, and usually the technology or the invention will be obsolete even before the patent period finishes, which will not allow the society to benefit from the invention (Singh, n.d.). However, software patent can be thought of as investment in the development cycle of the idea or invention, without patent, invention will attract people to copy it an register it under their name, non software patent advocates argue that software patent serves big companies and harm small one’s, but this is not true as Google started from small software patents and now one of the multi-billion companies. (Duffy, 2006)

Trademark

Trademark is a logo, name, or phrase that used by company to signifies and identify its products and services and show that they are originated from the desired source, so they can be distinguished by this logo.

Software companies can register their products or their company name as a trademark, which prevents another company from having the same name for its products. As other intellectual property aspects, trademarks are infringed by the use of the internet, the most simple example for that is having a domain name which can be pronounced like a well known company to attract people, like the case for Mike Rowe who created a domain name of www.mikerowsoft.com, (Tennant, 2005) especially with Microsoft either by purpose or not, people use application names or part of it when they name their applications, or maybe that’s the most thing we get exposed to in our region.

Software Trademark protects software product names and software company names from being used, it protects the company’s image in addition to software itself, trademark can be renewed, unlike patents. The software trademarks protects the company’s reputation, for example, when the companies or software trademarks is attached to software documentation, it proves that this document is original, as well trademarks for certified people, like VMware certification, shows that this person is certified and approved expert in this field by the mother company, same for software distributers and software company partners, who are differentiated by the Trademark of the mother’s company in a specific product or list of products (Jacobs & Wynbrandt, 1997)

The protection for Trademark cannot happen only by registering the software in the country of origin for the company, it should be registered in multiple countries to be covered by the law in different regions. Trademark law and trademark registration may differ between countries, for example, In Qatar, not any business’s logo; name or sign can be registered as trademark, alcoholic beverages are not allowed to register under the Qatari Law. (AGIP, 2010).

References:

Adams, A.A. & McCrindle, R.J. (2008) Pandora’s box: Social and professional issues of the information age. West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd


AGIP, (2010), ‘Qatar, Trademark, FAQ’, [Online], Available from: http://www.agip.com/country_service.aspx?country_key=60&service_key=T&SubService_Order=4&lang=en
(Accessed: 29 March 2011)

Brown, P. (2010), 'Trademark Hair Use Online', Computer & Internet Lawyer, 27, 6, pp. 13-19, Computers & Applied Sciences, [Online], Available from:


Fenwick & West LLP, (n.d.), ‘International Legal Protection for Software: Introduction’, [Online], Available from: http://www.softwareprotection.com/
(Accessed 29 March 2011)

Jacobs, J. & Wynbrandt, R. (1997), "Overview of trademarks", Association Management, vol. 49, no. 10, pp. 110 [Online]. Available from: http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/ehost/detail?sid=6f176a52-c335-46b0-aa0f-2e2602b77685%40sessionmgr11&vid=1&hid=13&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=s3h&AN=9711173665 (Accessed: 29 March 2011)

Naser, M. (2009), ‘Computer Software: Copyrights v. Patents’, [Online], Available from:
(Accessed 29 March 2011)

Al Sharari, S. (2006), ‘Intellectual Property Rights Legislation and Computer Software Piracy in Jordan’, [Online], Available from:
(Accessed 29 March 2011)

Tennant, D 2005, 'Trademark Arrogance', Computerworld, 39, 31, p. 16, Computers & Applied Sciences , [Online], Available from: http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/ehost/detail?sid=11e45e26-7c72-47eb-b820-50e96640bcf9%40sessionmgr15&vid=1&hid=8&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=iih&AN=17781581
(Accessed: 29 March 2011)


Singh, G. (n.d.), ‘World Trade Organization, Intellectual Property Rights’, [Online], Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/gurjeit/wto-ipr-report
(Accessed 29 March 2011)

Duffy, J. (2006), ‘Software Patents: What Good Are They?’, [Online], Available from:
(Accessed 29 March 2011)

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