Piracy Glossary
Copyright - Copyrights protect an author's particular way or form of expression. They do not protect ideas, systems or factual information conveyed in the work
Counterfeit - Works or goods that appear to be the same as or produced by the legitimate owner of an intellectual property. The effects of this can include dilution of a trademark, undermining the legitimate owner's business
DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Digital Rights - Property rights of digital media formats
Dilution - Incorporating another's trademark or other intellectual property into your work without permission or in such a way that it creates an association of the original mark or property with your endeavor or with a negative experience or situation, thus harming the true owner's business. Dilution can reduce the available market for the legitimate owner of the intellectual property.
Fair Use - Limited circumstances under which it may be allowable to reference or sample works without seeking an express release from a copyright holder. The circumstances under which fair use may apply include criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Four tests are involved: purpose and character of use, nature of copyrighted work, amount and substantiality of portion used, effect of use on potential market for copyrighted work.
Infringement - The use of a work or a part of a work without permission, or the improper use of another's trademark or a confusingly similar mark that creates the appearance of an affiliation with or actually being the other product or service.
Organized Piracy - Criminal networks that copy, distribute and undermine the market of legitimate products.
Patent - A property right granted to an inventor “to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into the United States” for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure of the invention when the patent is granted.
Patents are broken into three major categories:
· design (protect new, original, and ornamental designs for articles of manufacture),
· utility (protect useful processes, machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter) or
· plant (protect invented or discovered, asexually reproduced plant varieties).
Piracy - Copying or distributing protected works or products without the permission of the true owner/author of an intellectual property.
Plagiarism - The act of copying any portion of another's work and representing it as your own, regardless of whether or not the work is copyrighted or in the public domain. It is unethical to do so, and if a copyrighted work is involved it can also be an infringement of property rights. There are many style guides available that provide instructions for properly crediting and referencing other's works when incorporated into your own. A word of caution -- simply reworking the text when the concept is clearly lifted from another's work can still be plagiarism.
Public Domain - Works that are freely available for commercial or public use without restriction - not protected by copyright restrictions.
Streaming - A technology that permits "live" or scheduled on-line distribution of digital media, where the user views the media via an interactive session with a host server.
Trademark - A property right that protects words, names, symbols, sounds, or colors that distinguish goods and services from those manufactured or sold by others and to indicate the source of the goods. Trademarks, unlike patents, can be renewed forever as long as they are being used in commerce.
Trade Secrets - Information that companies keep secret to give them an advantage over their competitors. There is no mechanism to register trade secrets with the U.S. government.