Safety first protecting your intellectual property

Safety first protecting your intellectual property
By Margaret LaCugna, BDEE writer

Often a client’s first encounter with a vendor or a consultancy group is through a PowerPoint presentation or a .PDF document sent in an email, perhaps an Excel spreadsheet or a Hyperion accounting report. Even if these are password protected – an obvious first step in asset control – these documents can, even without permission granted, be sent electronically or amended and presented in person to those not intended. Either way, the probability is high that the document will be passed around, revised for content since, after all, a significant amount of investment was made for the solution presented to the client whether it was best practices for programme management or criteria for decision making. Even if a document (broadly defined as email, CDs, flowcharts, workflows, transaction processing, Blackberry text message) or any intellectual property is marked confidential or proprietary, managers and executives must realise any document can have legs and move within, along or even outside organisational lines.

But does the responsibility stand with the vendor or the client? Think of the disclaimers that are routinely appended to your corporate emails! Usually they do not state that they are confidential, they state they are virus-free and have been scanned: “The information in this email, and any attachment therein, is confidential and for use by the addressee only. If you are not the intended recipient, please return the email to the sender and delete it from your computer. Although X client attempts to sweep email and attachments for viruses, it does not guarantee that both is virus-free and accepts no liability for any damage sustained as a result of viruses.”

However, there is no reliable mechanism in place to stop intranet email being forwarded to an external account which implicitly means potentially confidential information cannot be controlled after initial distribution.

It is very difficult to assign and maintain control of any intellectual property legally. An employee agrees that any work product they produce belongs to the employers, but how is the employer to protect heavily invested euros. Corporations like Boeing and Airbus have clear licence protection to minute workflow charts and each blueprint.

There are numerous new ways to gain content for electronic articles and general content in the IT operating world globally. Webcasts and RSS (either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication – a method of describing financial, sport or political news, essentially any web content that can be distributed online to internet users) feeds are the newest ways for information dissemination, and again, the asset protection is limited.

Document management and its recognisable intellectual capital implications rocket quickly via digital copies, mobile phone capabilities like web mailing, blogs, and text messaging, network systems or RSS feeds and the next emerging technology that we can all capture – whatever it may be. This can be done innocently using wireless access or maliciously by hacking into sophisticated technical encrypted centres of commerce. Yes, information now comes with many cool tools, but how easily can its dissemination be protected? I can forward easily from my laptop or my phone, so today perhaps it might be categorised as public domain for a price.

Of particular interest are the webcasts (multi-media broadcasts) offered by many large consulting firms or solutions vendors. These usually are free and viewed from your terminal. Within a few days, the content is available electronically. It is an excellent way to participate in a global forum on relevant topics. In today’s global instantaneous world, it is easy to rip a CD-ROM, cut and paste anything from a beloved universal image, a clever political phrase or even a social cartoon with three keystrokes. Voila! Anyone can love it or hate it, the creator receives no financial or artistic credit for asset creation or control of how it might be used or misused. With the recent advent of RSS feeds, content can be taken on a very quick journey anywhere under any guise or authorship. The essential question to ask, is how to manage content and control its distribution since it is often the only intellectual property some businesses or individuals possess. Several industries come to mind immediately for example, the ownership and licensing associated with stock photography and the travel industry.

Both industries share images (photos) which are “sold” to clients for use in multiple industries. An image with an associated right (income) is extremely difficult to obtain in the stock photography industry. Industry estimates are that 80-90 percent of the available images have no associated rights. The general rule for stock photography is one or two uses equal fair use. So for example, Getty Images gains, not the creator!

With the recent announcement that Jupitermedia Corporation has acquired a 49.7 percent equity investment in HAAP Media Ltd, based in Budapest, Hungary, stock photography and the management of its asset properties comes to the fore. Currently there are two Hungarian HAAP Media stock photo websites: Stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu) and Stockxpert.com (www.stockxpert.com).

Stock.xchng is viewed as one of the largest stock photo communities globally with more than 25 million page views monthly and over 500,000 registered users. Photos cannot be purchased from Stock.xchng, but users are linked to sister site Stockxpert.com where stock photos can be purchased at a minimal cost. This relationship, combined with royalty-free and traditional rights-managed image offerings, distinguishes Jupiterimages from its competition. It estimates it generates over 300 million page views monthly.

Elsewhere, www.picscout.com (www.picscout.com) recently acquired an Israeli image firm, which also illustrates the global nature of asset management and offers solutions to enterprises, photographers and agencies. It tracks how a brand is being used online and tracks the visual use on the internet. One specific reference that is recommended is WIPO http://www.wipo.int/copyright/ecommerce/en/index.html for extensive and current expertise in world asset and property management.

Leonardo (www.leonardo.com) also offers a vast array of content and electronic image solutions for businesses as well their distribution and asset retrieval mechanism.
With continental national boundaries blurred in many respects, Leonardo has successfully undertaken the centralisation of extensive numbers of images which might need to be swapped or amended on just a moment’s notice to over 70,000 internationally registered members. Leonardo’s media bank hosts digital images from over 12,500 hotels, 70 tourist boards and numerous tourist attractions in over 140 countries. The media bank allows customers to store their graphics content (pictures, logos, texts, maps and illustrations) digitally. This content can then be managed and updated whenever necessary, and distributed electronically to travel partners and customers worldwide.

There are many easily accessible and free white papers from premier organisations to help you diagnosis your internal requirements and client user requirements for document and data protection. Useful examples include those at Symantec about data archiving and stage management and www.finetra.com, which while financially oriented, covers various subjects relevant to global asset security.

Remember, as complex as some of the legal, archival regulatory compliance, technical and privacy considerations might appear, protect yourself! Backup your data run it all once to be certain it works and practice a recovery position after a disaster test. This is your personal resiliency whether at home or at work. You must begin by protecting your work assets and intellectual property whether it be that soothing beach scene that your editor loves or a humorous joke sent from the workplace!

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