Professional Issues: Intellectual Property Rights Report 2022

Running Head: Professional Issues 1
Professional Issues: Intellectual Property Rights
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There are various ways of protecting intellectual property rights which include copyright,
patent, trademark, and the law of confidence. Thus, harnessing the above approaches can be very
useful in protecting property rights in software in various ways.
Copyright
Copyright describes the fundamental laws that provide for ownership over the things
created by an individual or organization. Such creations include, for example, photographs,
books, and movies. The ownership granted through copyright comes with various rights that the
owner exclusively has. Those rights include distribution and reproducing the work and display
the work publicly. Thus, patents can grant the owner of software with the right to copy and
manipulate data. The above rights hence assures the owner of a software that the rights are
his/hers’ alone unless one is willing to give them up no individual can violate them legally
(Joyce, Ochoa, Carroll, Leaffer, & Jaszi, 2016). From the given text, copyright is concerned with
the right to copy something.
Patent
A patent refers to the exclusives rights afforded and granted after an invention, for
example, a unique process that provides a general and new way of doing something or providing
a new technical optimal solution to a problem. In order to be provided with a patent right, an
individual or an organization must disclose the technical information about a certain invention to
the public. Organizations may acquire patents of their trade secrets, for example, Coca Cola
Company owns patent rights on their manufacture and trade secrets where no one is supposed to
mimic. The software producers hence have the right of protecting their inventions through
creating a monopoly from their competitors for a certain period of time (Mueller, 2016). From

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the text provided, patents are meant to give the investors a monopoly of exploiting their
inventions for a certain period.
Trademark
A trademark refers to a recognizable sign, word or phrase and any other symbol that
identifies a specific product and legally provides a difference between other products of its kind.
Thus, a trademark collectively identifies a certain product or service belonging to a specific
organization and recognizes the organization’s ownership of the brand. A trademark can be a
slogan, a corporate logo or the name of the product. With the trademark right, for example, a
company is protected from any duplication of its name from other companies or its way of
packaging its products. Trademark rights can help in reducing the duplication of software by
other competitors in a similar field after a clear identification (Vries, Pennings, Block, & Fisch,
2017). From the reference material, trademark identifies the product of a particular
manufacturer.
Law of confidence
The law of confidence entails the protection afforded to the secrets that as contract
matter, is facilitated and governed by the collective common law. Unlike the copyrights and
patent protection, there are no applicable statutory provisions in this aspect of intellectual
property. In order to facilitate the law of confidence three requirements must be met which are
necessarily quality, the requirement of an obligation of confidence, and unauthorized access to
information occurrence. If a software meets the above three conditions, law of confidence can be