Practice Questions Flashcards
Formative 1
Your friend has started a new business by developing an innovative software product. The software aims to help supermarkets increase their sale through extracting data from the supermarkets’ applications. The software will use the data to produce a weekly personalised shopping list for each customer. To achieve this the software will use the shoppers’ data to find out about their favourite brands, frequency of getting each individual item, the number of items (each time bought), etc.
Advise your friend about the different types of intellectual property interests, related to their newly found business.
When it comes to intellectual property (IP) interests, there are several types of protection that the friend should consider for their software and related business. Here are the main types of intellectual property protection relevant to their venture:
Copyright: Copyright protects original works of authorship, such as software code, graphics, and written materials. The friend should ensure that their software code and any other original content created for the software, such as user interfaces or documentation, are properly protected by copyright. While copyright automatically exists upon creation, it’s advisable to register the copyright with the relevant copyright office for additional legal protection.
Trademarks: Trademarks protect brand names, logos, slogans, and other distinctive marks that help identify and distinguish products or services. The friend should consider trademarking their business name, logo, or any unique branding associated with their software product. Trademark registration provides exclusive rights to use the mark and prevents others from using similar marks in the same industry.
Patents: Patents protect inventions, including new and useful processes, machines, or compositions of matter. While software itself can be challenging to patent, certain aspects of the software, such as unique algorithms or innovative methods, may be eligible for patent protection.
Trade Secrets: Trade secrets encompass valuable, confidential information that provides a competitive advantage to a business. As the friend’s software relies on data extraction and analysis, they should take measures to protect any proprietary algorithms, data collection methodologies, or other trade secrets. Implementing robust security measures and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) for employees and contractors can help safeguard this sensitive information.
Formative 2
It is early in the days of the Internet and you and your friends have just had a great idea. You are avid football fans, fond of late night conversations about which team is really the best, which player the most productive at a particular position. Statistics are thrown about. Bragging is compulsory. Unlike other casual fans, you do not spend all your time rooting for a particular team. Your enjoyment comes from displaying your knowledge of all the players and all the teams, using statistics to back up your claims of superiority and inferiority. You find these conversations pleasant, but frustrating. How can one determine definitively who wins or loses these debates? Then you have a collective epiphany. With a computer, the raft of statistics available on football players could be harvested to create imaginary teams of players, “drafted” from every team in the league, that would be matched against each other each week according to a formula that combined all the statistics into a single measure of whether your team “won” or “lost” as against all your friends’ choices. By adding in prices that reflected how “expensive” it was to choose a particular player, one could impose limits on the tendency to pick a team composed only of superstars. Instead, the game would reward those who can find the diamond in the rough, available on the cheap, who know to avoid the fabled player who is actually past his best and prone to injury.
At first, you gather at the home of the computer-nerd in your group, who has managed to write the software to make all this happen. Then you have a second epiphany. Put this online and everyone could have their own team—you decide to call them FANtasy Football Teams, to stress both their imaginary nature and the intensity of the football-love that motivates those who play. Multiple news and sports sites already provide all the basic facts required: the statistics of yardage gained, sacks, completed passes and so on. The UEFA offers an “official” statistics site, but many news outlets collect their own statistics. It is trivial to write a computer program to look up those statistics automatically and drop them into the FANtasy game. Even better, the nature of a global network makes the markets for players more efficient while allowing national and even global competition among those playing the game. The global network means that the players never need to meet in reality.
FANtasy Football Leagues can be organized for each workplace or group of former college friends. Because the football players you draft come from so many teams, there is always a game to keep track of and bragging to be done on email or around the water cooler. FANtasy Football is an enormous success. You and your friends are in the middle of negotiations with Yahoo! to make it the exclusive FANtasy Football League network, when you receive a threatening letter from UEFA. They claim that you are “stealing” results and statistics from UEFA games, unfairly enriching yourself from an activity that the league stages at the cost of millions of euros. As this drama is playing out, you discover that other groups of fans have adapted the FANtasy Football idea to basketball and volleyball and that those leagues are also hugely popular.
1) Should you be able to stop the “copycat” fantasy leagues in baseball and
basketball? To demand royalties from them? Why?
2) What could you say in support of / against the UEFA’s argument?
1) Whether they should be able to stop the “copycat” fantasy leagues in baseball and basketball, or demand royalties from them, depends on the intellectual property rights associated with your FANtasy Football game and the legal framework governing fantasy sports.
a) Intellectual Property Rights: If they have obtained intellectual property protection for their FANtasy Football game, such as patents or copyrights, they may have legal grounds to prevent others from directly copying or replicating their game without permission. However, it’s important to note that intellectual property rights generally do not extend to the underlying concepts or ideas behind a game. They instead protect the specific expression of those ideas.
b) Legal Framework: The legality of fantasy sports, including baseball and basketball leagues, varies by jurisdiction. In some countries, fantasy sports are considered a form of skill-based gaming and are protected under specific laws. If their FANtasy Football game falls under such legal protection, it may strengthen their position to stop copycats or demand royalties. On the other hand, if fantasy sports are not specifically regulated or protected in a particular jurisdiction, it may be challenging to prevent others from creating similar games.
2) In support of the UEFA’s argument, they may claim that you and your friends are “stealing” results and statistics from UEFA games, which they stage at significant financial cost. The UEFA may argue that you are benefiting from their investment in gathering the statistics and unfairly profiting from their copyrighted or proprietary data.
In opposition to the UEFA’s argument, you could assert the following points:
a) Publicly Available Information: If the statistics and results used in your FANtasy Football game are publicly available and not protected by intellectual property rights, you may argue that you are simply utilizing factual data that is accessible to the public. Copyright law generally does not extend to facts or data itself, but rather to the creative expression or compilation of that data.
b) Transformative Use: You could argue that your FANtasy Football game transforms the raw statistical data into a new and original form, creating a distinct and separate experience from the UEFA’s games. This transformative use may be considered fair use, depending on the jurisdiction, as it adds value and serves a different purpose than the original data.
c) Parody or Criticism: If your FANtasy Football game incorporates UEFA statistics in a satirical or critical manner, you may claim that it falls under the protection of freedom of expression or fair use. This argument would depend on the specific legal framework and the extent to which your game utilises UEFA’s statistics.
