Cyber Theft of Intellectual Property

With the growth in the use of internet these days the cyber crimes are also growing. Cyber theft of Intellectual Property(IP) is one of them. Cyber theft of IP means stealing of copyrights, trade secrets, patents etc., using internet and computers.

Copyrights and trade secrets are the two forms of IP that is frequently stolen. For example, stealing of software, a unique recipe of a well-known dish, business strategies etc. Generally, the stolen material is sold to the rivals or others for further sale of the product. This may result in the huge loss to the company who originally created it.

Earlier, a lot of physical labour, time and money was spent to steal a trade secret or make a pirated version of anything. The original copies had to be physically stolen which used to take lot of time and money. But in the present scenario these works can be done easily sitting at one place without shedding too much time and money on it without leaving any proof of it.

One of the major cyber theft of IP faced by India is piracy. These days one can get pirated version of movies, software etc. The piracy results in a huge loss of revenue to the copyright holder. It is difficult to find the cyber thieves and punish them because everything they do is over internet, so they erase the data immediately and disappear within fraction of a second. The country has started taking strict measures to curb this offence. Telangana Intellectual Property Crime Unit (TIPCU) is one of the first unit that has been launched to deal with the IP crime.

Some of the ways through which one can protect IP from cyber theft are:

• Frequently updating the list of IPs’ that need to be secured.
• The company can increase the security to access its trade secrets.
• It can reduce the number of people who can access their trade secrets.
• Company needs to be up to date with software systems.
• Constantly checking for some unusual cyber activities.
• Constantly educate their employees about cyber security.
• Constructing some threat mitigating programmes.
• Installing up-to date anti-virus software.
• Allowing employees to reach only some classified data.

Even after taking all these steps to protect IP’s there is no guarantee that they cannot be stolen because human dependence on the internet is growing constantly and people come up with new ways to do even a small thing so even in this case these cyber thieves may come up with new ways to crack all these security systems.

Author: M.Sai Krupa, Intern at Khurana & Khurana, Advocates and IP Attorneys. Can be reached at [email protected].

References:

[1] http://law.jrank.org/pages/11992/Cyber-Crime-Intellectual-property-theft.html

[2] http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2017/05/12/trending-topics-intellectual-property-at-risk-from-cyberthreats/

[3] https://www.iiprd.com/indias-first-ip-crime-unit-launched-telangana-state/