Importance of Intellectual Property Protection

Apple is one such company which focuses on protecting its Intellectual property from getting copied by its competitors, in the recent times the company has made frivolous law suit against companies such as Samsung, MI and One Plus. For a technology company it becomes highly important to protect its intellectual property (Hook, 2017).

Apple captures a large amount of customer data to use it to create innovative products for its customers. Steve Jobs of Apple gave high importance to keep the data safe and the same is been translated in the vision of Present President and CEO Tim Cook. It has been pointed that the company does not create user profile of its customers, however it does end to end encryption of Imessage and Facetime and tries to keep the information as much as possible on the device rather than storing it on Apple server. This gives a lot of power in the hands of the consumer on data protection and safeguarding their own data. Apple adopts differential privacy, it lets the company gain insights from huge datasets, but with a mathematical proof that no one can learn anything about even one of its individual (Ernst, Conley & Omland, 2016).

The company’s icloud is one of the most secure cloud platforms in the world, it is so secure that in the recent past, and even the FBI could not break the code to learn some information about some customers. Differential privacy ensures that all the customer data is safe and is protected from any cyber-attack. The company started using Differential privacy technology in a bid to discover the usage pattern of large number of audience without compromising the privacy of the individuals. This technology in IOS10 helps not only to improve the quick type and emoji feature of the company; it also helps Spotlight deep link suggestions and Lookup hints in the notes (Smith, 2017).

The innovation of company is encompassed in its Intellectual property which is an assimilation of its Patent, Trademarks and copyrights. Apple is of the opinion that it is extremely important to protect the Intellectual property rights from infringement. The company adopts the following steps for the same:

• The web site of Apple serve as a non-commercial electronic informational forum, here the company uses the Apple word mark to protect its content (Robertson, Hannah & Lautsch, 2015).
• Registration of the trademarks.
• Working about patenting business methods.
• The company takes precaution on disclosing its trade secrets and gets its patent protected by the TPSS (Appleyard, 2015).
• The company also has taken insurance on the Intellectual property rights which covers its legal costs and protect it from potential infringers.
• The company uses trademark symbols or copyright notice to protect its digital process.
• Another strategy to protect the rights is by using Watermarks which embed copyright information into the digital content.
• The company uses Time stamp to its digital content, it helps to modify the body of digital document and the associated dates with the Operating system.
• The company uses online agreements as a measure to give visitors only a limited license to use the content available on the website.
• The company uses encryption to safeguard software products, audio-visual work and phonograms from unlicensed use.

• The company sends a cease and desist letter and askes the infringer to stop using the company’s digital process.
• A digital millennium copyright act (DMCA) takedown notice is send for the infringement of copyright on the internet(Wang, 2018).
• Use of court injunction to stop the patent from being infringed.
• Filing a lawsuit, like it did in the case of Samsung.

Thus, it can be seen that Apple uses plethora of digital processes to protect its Intellectual property rights, it is done in the form of Cloud services, encryption, fingerprinting and many more. The company though sits at the helm of safeguarding its Intellectual property rights and this is the reason Apple has not lost any of its patent and case in the court. The company even triumphed over Samsung protecting its design patent (Johnson, 2018).

IP risk and description	Likelihood	Impact on the organization	Controls to be implemented
Within the Organization itself-A major portion of the IP risk originates from the organization itself and due to the activities of its own people. For example Mercedes Benz in the recent past formed a case against one of its mechanical engineers who was about the join the rival of Mercedes, Ferrari.  According to the company, the employees were part of Mercedes AMG High performance Powertrains and have search and saved a lot of saved data. This information could have potentially harmed the company’s interest in winning the race and taking a competitive edge over Ferrari, but due to the engineer role, the company’s position can be highly compromised	The chances of occurrence of such phenomenon in present day global scenarios are more than highly probable. Due to large and culturally diverse organization the roles of the employees are not restricted to their own business unit, due to which it becomes easy for someone with not good interest to harm the organization.	The potential impact on the organization can be in tune of millions and billions of dollars. Such IP risk can put the company on back track and give a big competitive edge to its competitors. It also helps the competitor to launch the product much before the parent company. Thus, it can be said that it has a disastrous implication on the business organization.	There are a number of things the organization can do to prevent and safeguard the organization from such high intensity IP risk. Some of the examples are: · Not joining the competitor firm for at least a period of 3 years. · Signing on the form of data protection act. · Safeguarding all the intellectual propriety as soon they are invented and posing severe fine on infringement. · The codes of patented property and the access have to be given only and only to the senior most management who have been working in the organization for a period of over 10 years or more (Blodworth et. al., 2015).
Risk from independent third parties-This type of risk originates from companies holding the IP rights, patent assertion entities and even the non-practicing entities. It has been observed that IP risk from such organization did reach an all-time high in the year 2015. Pharma companies have a big risk from the Hedge fund manager, as they know all about the drug and the technology and can easily turn the novel idea of the company into a profit making venture, thus posing a big violation for the patent creator.	This type of risk can be seen as unsystematic risk, as it is being created by the independent third party. There is no parameter to define the likelihood of such IP risk and its assessment, as it is highly unsystematic in nature. It occurs on the ground of excessive greed.	The potential impact on the organization can be extremely severe. The company can easily lose out its business or trade secret to the competitor or is at the mercy of the infringer. The infringer can easily leak the patent or intellectual property of the organization with an intention of hurting the business organization.	The company can easily knock the door of Patent office panel, as it is less expensive and better functioning that the Federal courts. Another proactive control measure which the organization can take is to create facilities to store the patent on high secure cloud platform by encrypting the pattern or the content of the patent. The rights to the cloud to be in the hands of the CEO or the R&D head of the organization, and a document for safeguarding has to be signed by the respective authorities, failure to do so will impose serious ramifications(Schotter & Teagarden, 2014).

References

Appleyard, M., 2015. Corporate responses to online music piracy: Strategic lessons for the challenge of additive manufacturing. Business Horizons, 58(1), pp.69-76.

Bloodworth, J.W., Holman, I.P., Burgess, P.J., Gillman, S., Frogbrook, Z. and Brown, P., 2015. Developing a multi-pollutant conceptual framework for the selection and targeting of interventions in water industry catchment management schemes. Journal of environmental management, 161, pp.153-162.

Ernst, H., Conley, J. and Omland, N., 2016. How to create commercial value from patents: the role of patent management. R&D Management, 46(S2), pp.677-690.

Hook, S.A., 2017. Intellectual Property: Nuts and Bolts.

Johnson, S., 2018. Guide to Intellectual Property: What it is, how to protect it, how to exploit it. The Economist.

Robertson, K.M., Hannah, D.R. and Lautsch, B.A., 2015. The secret to protecting trade secrets: How to create positive secrecy climates in organizations. Business Horizons, 58(6), pp.669-677.

Schotter, A. and Teagarden, M., 2014. Protecting intellectual property in China. MIT Sloan Management Review, 55(4), p.41.

Smith, A.D., 2017. Integrating Intellectual Property and the Smartphone Patent Wars: Case Study of Conflicts of Supplier Partnering.

Wang, B., 2018. After the European Commission Ordered Apple to Pay Back Taxes to Ireland: Ireland’s Future in the New Global Tax Environment. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 25(1), pp.539-564.