What Are Intellectual Property Threats?
2 min read
Online businesses must be careful in their use of intellectual property. Intellectual property is a general term that includes all products of the human mind. These products can be tangible or intangible.
Intellectual property rights include the protection afforded to individuals and companies by governments through governments’ granting of copyrights and patents, and through registration of trademarks and service marks.
Online businesses must take care to avoid deceptive trade practices, making false advertising claims, engaging in defamation or product disparagement, and violations of IP rights by using unauthorized content on their Web sites or in their domain names. The internet presents a tempting target for intellectual property threats because:
- It is very easy to reproduce an exact copy of anything found on the internet.
- People are unaware of copyright restrictions and unwittingly infringe on them.
Intellectual property threats to IP may come from the employee a supplier or a competitor. The employee can try to specifically disseminate IP or may just inadvertently give away intellectual property over social media channels.
The supplier may have access to sensitive IP through enterprise-collaborative application property through enterprise-collaborative applications. The competitor might scrap social media channels for intellectual property that should not have been made available or might use social media channels to disseminate intellectual property or even plant false IP to damage the reputation of the company.
Cybersquatting, name changing and name stealing are three main threats to intellectual property.
Cybersquatting
Cybersquatting is the practice of registering a domain name that is the trademark of another person or company in the hopes that owner will pay huge amounts of money to acquire the URL. In addition, successful cybersquatters can attract many site visitors and, consequently, charge high advertising rates.
Thus cybersquatting occurs when a person wrongfully appropriates occurs when a person wrongfully appropriates an Internet Domain Name to profit from the trademarks or goodwill associated with an individual or a company. A cybersquatter typically registers a domain name and then attempts who has trademark or other legal right in that domain name.
Name changing
Name changing occurs when someone registers purposely misspelled variations of well-known consumers who make typographical errors when entering a URL. The practice of name changing is annoying to affected online businesses and confusing to their customers.
Name stealing
Name stealing occurs when someone changes the ownership of the domain name assigned to the site to another site and owner. Once domain name ownership is changed, the name stealer can manipulate the site.
