Question

(TCO D) Your company is about to release a highly advertised, highly anticipated software solution that is expected to be financially successful.
i. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using copyrights, patents, and trade secrets to prevent your competitors from copying and selling your software solution.
You wish to license use of each copy of your software solution to one machine, unless licenses for multiple machines are purchased.
ii. How can you contractually prevent customers from using the software on more than one machine and/or require the purchase of multiple licenses?
iii. If you sell the software off the shelf or via downloads online, how would you effect the acceptance of any contractual terms?

Answer 1

I). Patent:

Patent is a design which is provided by government to protect your product from getting leaked it helps to reserve your rights.

Advantage:

Patent offers an artificial limitation in that product market which helps the owner to earn enormous amount of profit which he/she hasn't thought.
If some damage is done from outside then the government will pay you for the damage.

Disadvantage:

Patent itself is very expensive you have to pay alot of money just to make your entry into the patent list. Basically when you signed up for a patent you are revealing all your secrets about the product to government that how it works what is the mechanism behind.

Copyrights:

Copyrights is basically rights provided by government exclusively to you for your product.

Advantages:
If there's any damage done government will pay it for you and even you get some profit.
Copyrights are less expensive and their method is simpler.
By copyrights product owner gets protection.

Disadvantage:

As what it tells that it gives protection from the illegal persons but after doing some research and knowing from people I came to know that it is just a claim of protection they do not provide it actually.
Their rights are not like Patents maybe because of less expensive.

Trade Secrets:

Trade secrets is a basically a different type of protection for owners/ creator of product they provide protection to the mix of ingredients (we can say) of the product like formula, what things needed to produce it etc..
Advantage:
It gives protection to your design and your crucial information related to your product saving it.
It gives an advantage to his owner over their competitors by using a protection technique through this the competitors can never produce a product same as yours.
It is easy to understand and not very much expensive.
Disadvantage:
Trade secret often require extra money to involve government because it is independent.
You will not get any damage recovery.
If you fight a case against someone with trade secrets you have to spend huge sums of money.

II). We can use a technique in which every software will come with a unique key and that key can be used only on a single machine at a time. If it's used on multiple either installation shouldn't proceed or the product from previous machine should automatically uninstall. We can also use hardware locked licensing in which you have to activate your product online by purchasing a 30-20 digit key. By these methods you can gain control of this multiple machine

III). When you are selling a product online or off the shelf you should know that the traditional rules and regulation won't work on that you have to follow their laws like of online selling you have to follow e-commerce laws like Distance Selling Regulations, Electronics Selling Regulations etc. Basically the liberties you were carrying when selling on the shelf won't be there but some new opportunities will be there with a greater risk

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