Tài liệu Business Concepts pdf

Examples of intellectual property include the following: product—partic- The words to “Louie, Louie” The text of Hamlet The cosmetic design of the iMac The source code for the OS/2 op

Chapter 11

 How to license copyright materials

 Scope of your copyright

 How to copyright your material anywhere

 Consequences of not being aware of copyright issues, not following copyright restrictions

Identify the issues related to working in a global environment Content could include the following:

 Working in a multivendor environment with different currencies, etc

 International issues—shipping, supply chain

 Multilingual or multicharacter issues (Unicode)

 Legal and regulatory issues

Define the following Web-related mechanisms for audience development (i.e., attracting and retaining an audience):

Define e-commerce terms and concepts Content could include the following:

The Internet started out as the province of government agencies and academic institutions Profit wasn’t an issue then But as the Internet extended its reach into households around the world, businesses realized the potential for Internet commerce Today, business facilitated by the Internet

is a giant industry It continues to grow rapidly

As an Internet professional, you have to understand the business issues that (in many cases) drive technical innovations From copyright, to market-ing, to the design of Internet storefronts, you have to know what drives the decisions This chapter explains some of the issues

Intellectual Property on the Network

Intellectual property denotes any intangible product of a human being,

a group of human beings, or another legal entity (such as a corporation) Intellectual property law aims to protect the rights of creative people to cap-italize on the things they create

Practically speaking, intellectual property is any creative ularly one that has monetary value Examples of intellectual property include the following:

product—partic- The words to “Louie, Louie”

 The text of Hamlet

 The cosmetic design of the iMac

 The source code for the OS/2 operating system

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 The formula for making Coca-Cola

 The Nike “swoosh” logo

 The design of the Trinitron picture tube

 The tune to “Macarena”

The question of what qualifies as intellectual property is an open tion—court cases come up all the time in which one party alleges that some-thing previously unmentioned in law enjoys copyright protection The Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Company sued Honda over its bikes’ exhaust noise Harley claimed that its bikes’ noise was a distinctive feature of their design and enjoyed copyright protection Harley lost, but this case gives an indication of the evolving nature of intellectual property law

ques-The computer revolution has forced many tests of intellectual property protections, many of which came about in the days when making a copy of

a work of music or literature was a difficult, expensive process Should a piece of software, which may be duplicated perfectly, instantaneously, and for negligible cost, enjoy copyright? Should Web publisher A be able to sue Web publisher B when B “frames” A’s content and presents it as his own? These are open questions still in the process of being decided

Copyright

A copyright is the right of an author, artist, publisher, or other legal entity

to collect money from the use of words, music, performance works, items of visual art, or other creative products Facts and short phrases cannot be copyrighted (though certain short phrases may be protected under trade-mark law) Copyright, in the United States, attempts to guarantee the creator several benefits:

 The right to reproduce the work and distribute the copies

 The right to revise and improve the work

 The right to perform or display the work publicly

 The right to have some assurance that the work won’t be defaced or used in a way the author did not intend

 The right to receive credit for others’ references to the work

Intellectual Property on the Network 515

A copyright depends on the ability of a person or entity that is claiming tection to prove original creation of the work in question and to prove that creation took place on a certain date U.S law actually allows two creators

pro-to have copyright on identical creative works, provided they arrived at their respective creations independently of one another

There’s a good copyright FAQ on the Web at bricolage.bel-epa.com/ resources/lounge/bureau/copyright/

A creative work whose author renounces his copyright or refuses to enforce it through infringement suits is said to be in the public domain Pub-lic domain works may be used by anyone, for any purpose, without the user paying royalties or licensing fees to anyone Other ways material may enter the public domain include the following:

 Copyright protection can lapse, as it does after some time period ally 50 or 75 years after the author dies, depending upon when it was first created or published)

(usu- Materials published by most governments (including that of the United States and its individual state governments) are automatically

in the public domain

Note that it is possible to sell public domain works This is what the publishers

of William Shakespeare’s plays do, for example.

Getting a Copyright

On one level, it’s very easy to get a copyright If you create a work, and can prove the date on which it was created, you have a legal copyright This is known as a common law copyright Common law copyright protects you from the moment that you create a work Of course, proving original cre-ation and its date can be tricky

If you put a copyright statement on a document, you alert the world that you claim ownership of the intellectual property contained in that document

A suitable copyright statement looks like this:

Copyright © January 1, 2000, Billy Pilgrim

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That copyright symbol is a tricky thing The c-in-a-circle isn’t part of all font packages, and it’s not clear that (c) is the legal equivalent of © just because the former is easier to make with a computer However, the spelled-out word copyright should be adequate

Because text can be edited so easily, you can improve the legitimacy of the date from which you claim copyright protection by sealing your document in

an envelope and mailing it to yourself The sealed, postmarked envelope serves as stronger—but not absolute—proof that you had the intellectual property on the date you claim

Registered Copyright

You can achieve an extra level of legal protection for a creative work by istering the work with your government’s copyright office Essentially, formal copyright registration provides a fairly unquestionable way of establishing when a work was created The duration of copyright protection established this way varies among media To cite one example, an author who registered

reg-a novel todreg-ay would enjoy copyright protection for the remreg-ainder of her life, and her heirs could enjoy the benefits of copyright protection for 50 years after her death

In the United States, the Copyright Office handles copyright registrations Its Web site appears in Figure 11.1 Other governments have similar agen-cies You request a registration form from the Copyright Office, fill it out, and send it in to the government with two copies of the work you’re regis-tering You can request the necessary forms from the Copyright Office’s voice-mail system at +1 202 707 9100 or get them on the Web in Adobe Acrobat format at www.loc.gov/copyright/forms/ You need particular forms for particular kinds of works Here’s a list:

Form TX Books, manuscripts, software, and games

Form PA Music (in written form), plus films, video recordings, scripts, and plays

Form SR Music (recorded)

Form VA Drawings, photos, and cartoons

Intellectual Property on the Network 517

Under a treaty called the Berne Convention, copyrights registered in any signatory country are valid in all others All major countries of the world are signatories

F I G U R E 1 1 1 The U.S Copyright Office Web site

Fair Use of Copyrighted Material

Copyright law recognizes that a vibrant creative community relies, in part,

on artists’ ability to use the creative products of others as starting points for their own creative work Such applications of copyrighted material are known as fair use applications in the law

Here are some examples of fair use:

 Cited excerpts in academic work

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 Excerpts that appear in a review

 Parody and satire

 Reproductions for personal, not-for-profit useThese aren’t cast in stone—the nature of fair use is constantly undergoing revision as those accused of copyright violations claim (and sometimes prove

to a court) that their use was fair

Though no precise statement of what is not fair use exists, the determining factors seem to be the size of the excerpt and the profit motive of the party using the copyrighted material Courts tend to favor fair-use claims pre-sented by nonprofit organizations over those put forward by organizations that have made money from their use of copyrighted material If you’re not making money (or causing the rightful copyright holder to lose money) as a result of your use of brief snippets, you’re probably okay

Licensing Copyrighted Products

If you want to use a copyrighted work in your own products—and ber, it does not matter whether the copyright is registered with a govern-ment—you must ask permission The copyright holder is free to do three things:

remem- Refuse you permission to use the material

 Allow you to use the material free of charge, provided you credit the copyright holder

 Require you to pay a fee for the use of the copyrighted material

The last of the three options is called licensing, and it’s a big part of the

intellectual property business Licensing deals take many forms and usually state explicitly what rights are being granted and what compensation will be paid for them A writer, for example, might write a story and grant a mag-azine the rights to publish the story once in its North American editions The magazine would pay a writer a fee for that right The writer would retain the rights to sell the story again for use as part of a compilation put out by a book publisher, without consideration to the magazine The writer would also retain, for example, the ability to license the story to a movie studio for adaptation into a screenplay

Securing the Entire Copyright

If you’re a publisher and want to secure the copyright to a work created by someone else (such as a freelance writer), you can secure the rights by either

of two means A work-made-for-hire agreement states that the creator of a

work (the freelancer) created it because he was hired by the publisher to do

so and paid accordingly (or paid something, anyway) Therefore, the lisher has the copyright and the freelancer does not

pub-A creator also can transfer the copyright on a work to another entity by

assignment Usually, assignment must involve an explicit, written statement

that says the original creator is granting her copyright to someone else, such

as a publisher

Infringement Consequences

Copyright, in the United States and most developed countries, is a matter of civil law That is, a copyright holder cannot complain to the government that someone has committed a crime by infringing upon her copyright Rather, a copyright holder can file a civil suit alleging infringement If the civil suit goes to trial and the infringement is found to have taken place, the defendant may be made to pay damages to the copyright holder

In point of fact, civil suits are expensive and generally are the last resort

of copyright holders who feel their rights have been infringed upon Usually, those using copyrighted material for purposes perceived to be unfair by the copyright holders will receive stern letters from the copyright holder or his lawyer, asking that the use stop If the perceived problem continues, the copyright holder can file suit and fight the matter in court If an infringement

is determined to have occurred, the entity using the material without sion may be judged responsible for damages and made to pay money to the copyright holder

permis-Trademarks

A trademark is much like a copyright except that trademarks apply to words,

phrases, and images used to describe products and services (technically, a

word, phrase, or logo that describes a service is called a servicemark, but the

legal concepts are pretty much the same) The following are examples of trademark-protectable intellectual property:

 A company’s name (e.g., Netscape Communications Corporation)

 A product’s name (e.g., Diet Coke)

 A logo (e.g., the AT&T globe image)

 A graphic device (e.g., the Izod alligator)

Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly LLP, a law practice, has put together a neat FAQ on the topic It’s on the Web at www.owdlaw.com/intprop/trademark/ faq/faq.html.

Registering a Trademark

As is the case with larger creative works protected by copyright, U.S law provides for trademark protection on words, phrases, and devices even if they’ve not been formally registered with the government You can assert a trademark or servicemark right by always printing a TM (for trademarks) or

SM (for servicemarks) next to the device you want to protect

You can establish stronger legal protection for your trademark by tering it Governments maintain registries of trademarked intellectual prop-erty In the United States, the U.S Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) maintains the list of registered trademarks To register a trademark, you must establish that it represents a unique way of denoting a product or ser-vice and is not in use by another entity You must also be actively using the trademark—you can’t register a trademark in anticipation of applying it to

regis-a product or service you’ll develop in the future (though this used to be sible) Once you have registered a trademark, you can follow it with the ® symbol to denote the registration

pos-You can get further information about registering a trademark at the USPTO Web site, www.uspto.gov/.

Using Trademarked Material

Trademarks run the risk of bringing about their own demise If a trademarked word is heavily advertised and becomes synonymous with a product or ser-vice, it loses its protectability This is why Xerox Corporation is so adamant that people not talk about “making xeroxes” or “xeroxing documents.” The

correct phrases, acknowledging the trademark on the Xerox name, are ing Xerox copies” and “copying documents” (as with a Xerox copier) You have to be careful to use trademarked words as adjectives, not nouns.

“mak-Generally, it’s not possible to license trademarked material The nies holding the trademarks usually are loath to share them with those selling products and services other than their own There is protection, however, for the incidental appearance of trademarks in creative media The producers of

compa-a movie thcompa-at fecompa-atures compa-a scene in Trcompa-afcompa-algcompa-ar Squcompa-are—where compa-a gicompa-ant Virgin Records sign appears—probably would not infringe upon Virgin’s trade-mark protection by showing the sign in the film as an incidental part of the scenery

Infringement Consequences

Trademark protection is a matter of civil law, and so enforcement of mark rights is similar to that of copyrights Refer to the copyright section for information on legal enforcement of intellectual property

trade-Patents

Patent law exists to protect physical devices and processes You might patent

a cleaner-running engine for automobiles, a faster kind of memory chip, a way of making harder steel, or a chemical formula for a more flexible plastic Essentially, patent law is the same as the law governing other kinds of intel-lectual property The difference is in the nature of the creative product In applying for a patent, you agree to make the details of your product or pro-cess available to the public in exchange for a monopoly in profiting from your invention The monopoly is limited by time—design patents (on the appearance of a product) last 14 years in the United States, while the time limit on utility patents (on products and processes) lasts 20 years

David Kiewit, a patent lawyer, has posted a good patent FAQ on the Web at patent-faq.com/index.htm.

Securing a Patent

Unlike other kinds of intellectual property, there are no implicit patents You can’t sue someone for patent infringement unless you have formally registered your claim with your government’s patent office Even if you and another party arrived at the same product independently, the right to sue for patent infringement goes to the party that first secures government registration

In order to be protectable by patent, a product or process must satisfy the following three requirements

Useful The product or process must accomplish something desirable New It must not have been patented before.

Nonobvious The product or process must be the result of creative work,

not something that would come naturally to someone skilled in the trade

to which the product or process applies

Of these, the newness and nonobviousness requirements are the hardest

to prove Novelty can by verified by a search of existing patents, which is something patent lawyers are trained to do Expert witnesses can assert non-obviousness

In the United States, the U.S Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) dles patent applications Its Web site appears in Figure 11.2 You can apply for a patent by describing it and filing the proper paperwork with the USPTO When the USPTO has examined your application and agrees that your idea is patentable, you are granted a patent Between the time you file and the time you receive your patent, you can refer to your product as having

han-“patent pending” status Legally, the phrase means little, but it may age aspiring idea thieves

discour-You can get further information about registering a patent at the USPTO Web site, www.uspto.gov/.

F I G U R E 1 1 2 The U.S Patent and Trademark Office Web site

Licensing Patented Products

Companies and individuals that have secured patents on their inventions often are eager to license their patents to others Indeed, many companies exist for the sole purpose of securing patents that may later be licensed to production companies (this business model is common in the biotechnology industries) Often, a patent license may involve a compensation system that’s based on the number of products sold At the end of each accounting period, the licensee pays the patent holder some royalty for each instance of the pro-tected item it sold during the period

Open Source and Public Licensing

Most of the software industry is based on companies and ware publishers—writing software, compiling it, and selling the compiled binary code to consumers The publishers invest in the people and other resources needed to create their products’ source code; they then keep that source code secret The idea is that a publisher deserves to profit from some-thing in which it has invested money to produce

individuals—soft-But an alternative model has long been a part of the hobbyist and demic communities These groups espouse the idea of writing software and making the source code public, available for anyone to examine, modify, and

aca-redistribute Such freely distributed programs are called open source

soft-ware The source code of certain Unix variants has always been available to the public, and lots of Unix utilities are open source, too But the idea hasn’t started to translate into the world of Intel-standard processors until recently

The Open Source Movement

The open source movement—an informal group of software publishers, book publishers, academic institutions, and individuals—holds the belief that software for which source code is freely available inspires innovation, whereas closed source software stifles it Opponents of the traditional micro-computer business model and of Microsoft Corporation in particular, mem-bers of the open source movement champions free software like the Linux operating system, the Perl language, and the GNU utilities

Public-domain software has no copyright protections at all This means

that anyone may acquire, copy, and use the software without paying a ing fee to anyone (there’s no copyright holder to which to pay such a fee) Publishers are free to charge for public-domain software, and they may get the price they ask if they package it attractively and offer extra features, such

licens-as technical support This is the business model behind Red Hat, Caldera, and other distributors of the Linux operating system, the kernel of which is

in the public domain

The concept of copyleft is part of the open source movement The idea of

copyleft is that an organization (usually a not-for-profit group like the Free Software Foundation) establishes a copyright to an item of intellectual prop-erty—source code for software, usually—then distributes it, free of charge People who use the software must agree to its licensing agreement, which specifies they may not make a profit on its distribution The GNU utilities are covered by copyleft

There are details of copyleft on the Free Software Foundation’s Web site, at www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/copyleft/copyleft.html.

Using Open Source Software

You’re free to use open source software for any purpose you wish without paying a licensing fee to anyone You may modify the software to suit your particular needs, and you may redistribute the software as you wish You can even try to sell the software if it is in the public domain If the software is copylefted, however, you may be prohibited from making a profit on it

The Global Marketplace

The Internet spans the planet It has the potential to bring about truly free, worldwide markets in which the most efficient providers of goods and services have the advantage over others, unencumbered by geography and politics It’s a Utopian vision, but one that’s beginning to come true Your organization may want to get on board

But first, we need some perspective Fewer than three percent of the world’s population have ever used the Internet in any way (a statistic that isn’t so shocking when you consider that only about half the people in the world have placed a telephone call) Regardless, the community of Internet users is a great market, comprising mostly people of greater-than-average income and education

If you’re going to sell to the world over the Internet, you must be aware

of what you’re getting into You have to be prepared to communicate with people who prefer many different languages You’ll have to address vary-ing customs and courtesies You’ll also have to be sure that your company can deliver what it promises, get paid for its work, and comply with all rel-evant laws

Language and Communication

Communications technologies exist for the purpose of helping people talk to one another even when separated by time and distance You can chat with someone anywhere in the world in real time, and your Web site can sell your products while you’re asleep But the best communications tools can’t help you unless you and your audience share a common human language You have to be able to tell each other what you’re thinking

Language

English is the lingua franca on the Internet, probably because

English-speaking Americans make up a huge proportion of the user population and Americans are notoriously reluctant to pick up other languages Plenty of Internet resources exist in languages other than English, but it seems that two parties attempting to communicate across cultures default to English a

lot of the time New innovations, such as the Unicode character set that

makes it easier to incorporate non-Latin characters into displayed text, are making it easier to cater to the needs of non-English speakers

English is an awful language It’s loaded with irregularities, exceptions, special cases, and strange pronunciations Many English-language conven-tions—ungendered nouns, say—are totally at odds with what’s normal in other tongues Learning English as a secondary language is devilishly hard

So, when someone writes to you (assuming you’re an English speaker) and refers to a piece of software as “him” or talks about “the weather, which one

is rainful,” recognize that the writer is going to considerable effort to

accom-modate you Don’t disregard a message because its English is faulty Do your

best to interpret it, politely ask for clarification when you must, and reply as you would to a grammatically perfect message

As a Web publisher, you may decide to publish your content in multiple languages If you do so, make sure the translations are all good—have them done by someone who speaks both languages superbly and can catch all the idioms Don’t assume that translation software is good enough—it almost never is, and it’s obvious when translation has been done that way A bad translation is worse than no translation at all in many cases

Cultural Differences

Everyone knows how hard it is to communicate emotion in electronic mail

A person who mentions a “brilliant idea” you had may be paying you a

compliment, or may be using sarcasm to mock you The problem grows when the sender and recipient of a communication are on different cultural wavelengths.

In Brazil, it’s not unusual for a man, casually wishing another man bye, to pat his acquaintance on the stomach An Englishman, subjected to belly-patting for the first time, may be insulted—the same gesture in the United Kingdom might mean that the patter thought the pattee was putting

good-on weight In fact, it’s just a friendly gesture that’s meant to cgood-onvey nothing more than familiarity It’s a cultural affectation that the Englishman must learn to recognize and interpret properly

The same sort of situation can arise in e-mail Receiving an e-mail from a business contact in Australia, an American might be put off by the Aussie’s formal tone—such a stiff approach is adversarial, she might think It’s not—it’s a cultural trait of many Australians to use a somewhat reserved tone in written business communications of all kinds, even e-mail

It’s not fair to generalize There certainly are Australians who like to write casual e-mails for business and Americans who prefer a formal writing style The point is, be slow to take offense at perceived oddities in communications from other countries The odds are good that no hard feelings are meant and that you’re coming across just as strangely

Delivering the Goods

Sharing information is one thing, but business is based on actually providing customers with something they’re willing to pay for The process of getting goods and services to consumers is easy enough in a geographical area with

a good postal service and other package-delivery resources, but it’s more of

a challenge when there are oceans between you and your customers If you’re doing manufacturing work overseas or importing materials, you have to be concerned about the effect of shipping issues on your supply chain Getting paid for the things you sell can prove challenging, as well

Order Fulfillment

Many Internet businesses, tasked with delivering physical products to tomers scattered far and wide, set up distribution centers in various parts of the world Amazon.com, for example, has one warehouse in Delaware, one

cus-in Seattle, one cus-in the United Kcus-ingdom, and one cus-in Germany The relative ciencies of different snail-mail systems and routes still mean a lot Austra-lians, for example, report faster shipment of books from Amazon.co.uk in

effi-Getting Paid

Credit cards are magical things If a German uses his Visa card to make a purchase in Hong Kong, the merchant gets paid in Hong Kong dollars and the German pays his bill in Euros The banks and the credit card companies handle the currency exchange behind the scenes (at bulk interbank rates favorable to everyone) and the transaction goes as smoothly as one at the German’s local grocery store

The same holds true on the Web An American can buy a product from a British site without problem The merchant is paid in British pounds and the American pays his bill in U.S dollars Assuming there’s a way to get the product from Britain to the United States, the transaction proceeds without problem The moral: Use credit cards for cross-border transactions wherever possible

If you can’t use a credit card, you have other options

 Wire transfers between banks

 Wire transfers of cash (e.g., American Express and Thomas Cook)

 Personal delivery of cash

 Payment in kindThese aren’t really applicable to retail operations on the Web, but they’re all workable for consulting relationships and other business-to-business transactions You can try all kinds of strategies in businesses characterized

by a low volume of high-value transactions

Bear in mind that many countries regulate cash outflows (the United States, for example, requires you to report movements of sums greater than U.S

$10,000 out of the country) Bank transfers in some countries don’t always go

as smoothly as in others and may require some personal shepherding by a local citizen.

Obeying the Law

The legal standing of companies physically located in one country (to the extent that they have a physical location at all) while doing business in another country is still up in the air The matter seems to be reaching the