Question

What kinds of intellectual property protections do you believe are appropriate for software? Write a short essay (roughly 500 words) in which you argue your position and support it with appropriate citations to the assigned reading materials and other sources Your essay should clearly present your argument and explain why you disagree with some of the arguments made by people on another side of the debate (this means you need to cite articles supporting at least two different sides of the debate).

ASAP

Answer 1

The four types of intellectual property include:

1. Trade Secrets
2. Trademarks
3. Copyrights, and
4. Patents.

To protect your idea so that someone else cannot steal your idea, you need to secure one or more of the four different types of intellectual property (IP). Every invention generally starts out as an inventor’s trade secret. Before inventors market their inventions, they need to secure one or more of the other forms of intellectual property protection

The first type of intellectual property right is a trade secret. All inventions generally start out as a trade secret of the inventor. Inventors have an instinctual desire to keep their ideas secret. To market your invention, you should protect your idea with one or more of the other types of intellectual property rights: patents, trademarks, and copyrights.

Most people do not know or have not really realized that they are able to protect their invention using multiple types of IP rights. However, most products can be protected by all four types of intellectual property rights. Take, for example, a can of Coca-Cola®. The brand, “Coca-Cola,” is a trademark. The formula for the actual soda is a trade secret, while copyright protects the packaging art. The shape of the Coca-Cola® bottle is protected by both (1) a design patent and (2) a trademark (i.e. trade dress).

To identify the trade secrets in your idea, you need to understand the definition of a trade secret. A “trade secret” is any valuable information that is not publicly known and of which the owner has taken “reasonable” steps to maintain secrecy. These include information, such as a business plans, customer lists, ideas related to your research and development cycle, etc.

Trade secret protection is not appropriate for the long-term protection of any ideas which can be readily ascertained by reverse engineering or for inventions that can be independently created. If the information can be reverse engineered or independently created, then there is no nefarious act. If there is no nefarious act that accompanies the acquisition of the information, there is generally no misappropriation or wrongful appropriation of the trade secret information. Generally, trade secret protection is not optimal for mechanical or software products since both utilize a user interface that is available to the public and can therefore be reverse engineered.