Review on E-Business and Intellectual Property

Question: Discuss how the legal issues affect business. For example, could the problems have been avoided? Explain. Discuss realistic solutions supported by sound legal and business principles. Answer: Article Synopsis The website of a company can be a great tool for the promotion of e-business and also for generating sales. Though the increase in web commerce also increases the risk of the feel and look being copied, or even some of its features or the content of the website. The risk also includes the accusation of using other peoples intellectual assets in an unauthorized way. Some of the legal issues In case of a website, it is a collage of components owned by a number of persons. Like one may own the navigation rights and the other may own the rights of the photographs and some other individual owns the rights of the design of the website. It is not important to own IP rights of every element of one website but the important thing is to know what element one owns exactly and what rights one has to use what they own and dont own (Aggarwal, n.d.). If a website has been developed for an organisation by the employees they are paying to work on it, in such cases most of rights are owned by the company in most countries but in some companies the creation of website is outsourced to an outside contractor but one should not assume that they might own the IP rights because they have paid for it as one cannot own the IP rights for anything which has been created for them as the independent contractors usually have the rights to own the works they created even if someone else has paid for it. This would lead to the actual rights be limited to the creator of the website unless there is a written contract or agreement to the transfer of the rights to the person who paid for it (Chaudhry, 2013). Managerial perspective Some of the different types of legal protections that can be provided to the intellectual property rights are given below The search engines, e-commerce systems and the other form of technical tools can be protected by patents or utility models. The softwares which may also include the text based html code in the websites can be protected by the copyright or patents which would be dependent on the national law (Nyombi, n.d.). The design of the website is most likely to be protected by the copyright. The creative content in websites like that of photographs, written material, graphics, videos and music are also protecte3d by copyright. The databases are also protected by the database law or copyright. The logos, business names, domain names, product names and other signs are protected by the trademarks. The graphic symbols generated by the webpages, screen displays, graphical user interfaces and even webpages are protected through the industrial design law. The secret aspect of the web pages such as source codes, object codes. Graphics, programs, algorithms, data flow charts, database contents, data structures, user manuals, logic flow charts etc. Are to be protected by the trade secret law (Orozco, 2010). References Aggarwal, Raj. 'Business Strategies For Multinational Intellectual Property Protection'.SSRN Journaln. pag. Web. Chaudhry, Peggy E. 'Protecting Your Intellectual Property Rights'.Business Horizons56.2 (2013): 131-133. Web. Nyombi, Chrispas. 'The Role Intellectual Property Rights In International Business'.SSRN Journaln. pag. Web. Orozco, David. 'Legal Knowledge As An Intellectual Property Management Resource'.American Business Law Journal47.4 (2010): 687-726. Web.