Strategies for IPR/DRM protection and secrecy

Strategies for IPR/DRM protection and secrecy Document collaboration or product systems? Summary If your intention is to send information outside of your business because that is how you do business, or because this is what you are compelled to do, but you must take steps to protect the theft or misuse of that information you need a different solution to the 'collaboration' approach. Collaboration Systems assume that you have control over the environment of all the recipients, usually because they are your staff. But outsiders are not your staff, they don't play by your rules and you can't enforce your rules on them using collaboration techniques. The LockLizard Product System approach has been designed to manage information and content that is also going to outsiders. That does not mean that you cannot use it internally for protecting information and content, but unlike collaboration based products it also works outside of the organization, on multiple platforms and in multiple environments that you are not in control of. Introduction A lot is being written about Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) and how critical they are to the organization, but rather less is being written about what these topics mean, and which models and approaches are appropriate for which business scenarios. Further, there is a general confusion about what IPR actually is, and how it might be protected, especially among the technology community. So before you can sort out your DRM, you really need to understand what it is that you are trying to protect, and from whom, and why. Only then will it become clearer which tools are going to be the most appropriate for what you want to achieve. In this white paper we describe differences between information, IPR and trade secrets, and where these might apply. We discuss what are the practicalities for DRM controls, and what these might realistically be. Finally we look at the different market models for current protection products and how they work, and then conclude on the suitability of approaches. IPR or trade secret or what? Anyone wishing to do a 'Google' search on the term IPR will stagger away with over 6 million entries to plunder. This is a technical term meaning that you can read the intellectual property of others and make some use of it. You will also find out that it's an acronym for a great deal more than just intellectual property.
© LockLizard Ltd 2008 Strategies for IPR/DRM protection and secrecy Page 1 of 5 But even if we strip out half the entries we still have an enormous list to chew over. And which of them are relevant? Well, going to the other side of the question, what are you able to register Copyright (or obtain patent) in? Well, this might get easier - books, plays, films, music, broadcasts, semiconductor designs, databases, biological structures such as the human genome, chemicals and so on. Now this at least gives us a clue as to what we could be talking about. Copyright concerns itself with some (fairly) specific things, and also, like patents, makes it plain when it does not provide protection. It does not protect the recipe for the exact herbs (and ratios of them) that are used in the manufacture of drinks such as Coca Cola or Benedictine. These are Trade Secrets. It also does not cover 'know how' about how to do something, such as how to go about designing a semiconductor. That is something inside a person's head and it cannot be controlled. (Don't ask us, ask the lawyers. In the UK, at least, there is no copyright in the content of a legal contract, and in the European Union it has been held that there is no copyright in the content of a database unless work was done to gather, verify and add value to information captured and stored in a database. Mere collecting does not qualify.) And of course that is only the start of the confusion. If you have created something largely based on work done by someone who is not part of your business or who has not signed an agreement that says you own whatever intellectual property they provide (like using the content of this white paper, for instance) then you don't own any IPR and you could face legal action if you claim that you do. And if what you are protecting is Trade Secrets, and you fail to control who can see them (like leaving them on screen so that they can be read by someone walking past in a public location,... [download for more]