PY360 Ethics in Technology: Copyrights, Trade Secrecy and Patents

Copyrights, Trade Secrecy, and Patents
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Institution
Copyrights, Trade Secrecy, and Patents
A software copyright refers to how the government provides the creator of the software with certain rights to his or her original work. A trade secret is an extremely confidential piece of intellectual property which typically gives a company competitive advantage (Quinn, 2011). About software, the trade secret refers to its source code. Lastly, a patent allows the government to offer an inventor with an exclusive right to an individual piece of intellectual property. It is a public document having a detailed description of the invention (Wipo.int, 2016).
The five principle rights of the owner of a copyright
1 The right of distributing copies of the work to the public
2 The right to reproduce the copyrighted work
3 The right of performing the work in public
4 The right to display copies of the work in public
5 The right of producing new works derived from the copyrighted work
Copyright
Firstly, copyrights do not protect the idea but rather, the expression of the idea. Secondly, copyright protects the object program, not the source program. The copyright also protects what the program displays on the screen as it executes (Quinn, 2011). This is of value to the developers of video games. Violation of copyright law encompasses; distribution of programs over the internet; copying of programs onto a storage device and selling or giving it to someone else and preloading of a program onto a hard disk of a computer being sold.
A good example of the violation of copyright laws occurred in the early 1980s where Franklin Computer Corp. came up with the Franklin ACE that would compete with the Apple II. However, the Frankli...