Question

What we mean by Intellectual Property?

What are types of intellectual property? Give examples.

Show how the new technologies and internet infringing the copyright?

Explain what ‘Digital Rights Management (DRM)’ is and show how it utilized to protect the copyright.

Answer 1

Ans 1

It refers to any creation that can be leveraged for its novelty, ingenuity and/or financial worth. This includes inventions, literary/artistic works, designs, logos and symbols, names and images used in business etc.

Ans 2

Types include-

• Trademarks e.g. Apple's trademarks for cell phones
• Trade secrets e.g. the formula for Coke
• Patents e.g. Apple's recent patent for the “Mac Face ID” with a smart auto-wake feature
• Copyrights e.g. books published by eminent publications usually carry a copyright whereby no part(s) of the book may be reproduced without their permission.

Ans 3

Some illustrations on how this is done include-

• When firms/individuals copy pictures/materials off the internet to use on their websites (or for any other purpose) without paying for them or without taking any permission from the owner
• Copying text off e-books/sites and using them verbatim (plagiarism)
• Playing music at parties without paying for it (Bluetooth technology combined with the internet easily facilitates this)

Ans 4

DRM is a systematic approach to protecting copyrights for digital-media. The purpose is to prevent unauthorized re-distribution of digital content and restrict the ways in which consumers may copy things they haven't paid for.

Copyright protection using DRMs is basically a sophisticated encryption & decryption process. The security cycle begins with an encryption of communications (audios and videos). The content's decrypted eventually by a "Content Decryption Module (CDM)" after it generates License requests (typically including authentication data from the requesting device). Upon receiving all mandatory information, the server grants a license to the player/playback-software (with decryption keys) to allow secure distribution of the content.