CISSP D1 Preview | Intellectual property

Intellectual property is not a huge topic on the exam,but I think it can be easy points.
So let’s start out with Copyright.
And copyright is anything that is created– books, art, music, software, my courses.
All of those are copyright protected.
And copyright is automatically granted.
You don’t have to apply for it.
It is there when you create something.
And a copyright lasts for 70 years after the creator’s death or 95 years after creation, if it is done by a corporation.
And those numbers used to be lower.
It used to be 50 and 75 years.
But just before Mickey Mouse hit the public domain, Disney spent a ton of money lobbying to have the rules changed.
So now, it is 70 years for individuals and 95 years for corporations.
Trademarks are different.
They also serve a different purpose.
You can have a trademark or a registered trademark on your brand name, or your logos, or your slogan.
And here, corporations or individuals have to trademark them.
You pay a fee and then you have that registered trademark for 10 years.
And you can, technically, renew it indefinitely.
If you think of Nike, Nike is the brand name.
Then the swoosh, that’s their logo.
And then the “Just do it”, that’s their slogan.
All three are trademark.
And then we have Patents.
And patents are normally granted for 20 years.
And for us, it is important to remember cryptographic algorithms.
They can be patented.
And when we talk about those later, you’ll see some of them that are.
For a patent to be approved, obviously, you have to apply and then the invention has to be novel, meaning no one else has thought of it before.
It has to be useful.
It actually needs a practical application, and then it needs to be non-obvious.
Inventive work has to have taken place.
And for many things, 20 years can seem like a long time.
But a lot of drugs and medicine is patented and from the time where the patent is granted, till they’re done with clinical trials, can take many years.
By the time when they’re actually ready to put this drug to market, there might be 10 years or 11 years left on the patent.
And then finally, we have Trade Secrets.
And trade secrets is just us not telling anyone our secret sauce.
If we’re a super good at protecting it, it might be worth it.
But if someone random found out what it is, we have no recourse if they copy it.
And now that we have covered these different types of intellectual property, let’s look at the different types of attacks against them.
The most common attack against intellectual property, Piracy.
Software piracy, pictures, movies, anything really, where someone makes an illegal copy of someone else’s work where they don’t have permission and then either just keeps it for themselves or share it.
And tags on trademarks are obviously a little different.
Here, they’re trying to pretend to be the real brand.
They’re not trying to steal the actual art or the creation.
So here, we have Counterfeiting.
Fake Rolexes, Fake Prada, Nike, Apple.
Either they make a product that looks exactly like the original but sell it cheaper or they make something where you can kind of tell it’s not the real thing, but it looks almost like it.
It might be slightly misspelled or if you actually know how a Rolex watch looks, then you can tell the difference.
If not, then maybe not.
And then we have Patents.
And here, it is someone else using your novel invention, either knowingly or unknowingly.
But since you hold the patent and it is still active,you can sue them or come to some sort of agreement where they either pay you a fine or some sort of royalties for using your patent.
And for all these three, big companies spend a tremendous amount of money to protect their copyright, their trademarks, and their patents. And some of them make sense.
They want to protect the product they have made.
And some of them, I think, are probably reaching.
I think I saw Apple was suing a tiny company that was helping kids during COVID to learn from home.
And the reason they were suing was because in that company’s logo, there was a tiny apple.
It looked nothing like the Apple logo, but they still sued.
And from what I remember, Apple is pretty aggressive about that.
And I don’t think always for them, it’s about winning.
A tiny company like that, they have no chance of going to court.
They don’t have the money.
So for them, it’s much easier just to stop whatever they’re doing and it will scare companies away in the future who might think about using a regular Apple.
As you can tell, I think what they’re doing in this case is kind of ridiculous. And then finally, we have Trade Secrets. And remember, there is no legal protection here.
We’re just hiding our knowledge from the rest of the world. If they find out, we have no recourse. How they get that information can be illegal. This could often be corporate espionage.
But once the knowledge is out, it’s going to be very difficult to get it real back in.
And then finally in this lecture, let’s cover Cybersquatting and Typosquatting.
So cybersquatting is buying a URL that you know someone else will need.
And I also have it here saying it’s a legal gray area.
And it is a gray area because it depends on how you plan to use it.
So in the US, for instance, there are laws around cybersquatting.
If I, for instance, start a new company and I tell my friend, “I’m going to name it The Amazing Courses.”
Well if he then, that same night, goes out and buys all the domain names around that, that may or may not be legal.
It depends on how he plans to use it.
If he’s going to try to sell them to me for $100,000 each, well, then that’s illegal.
But there was a case, I think, with Kevin Spacey.
He did not buy KevinSpacey.com, I think someone in Canada did.
And they shared the same name.
So they bought KevinSpacey.com, and just used it for whatever random they would do it. Completely legal.
Kevin Spacey took the other well, Kevin Spacey to court and lost.
In most cases, cybersquatting is not a good idea.
But as mentioned, there is a lot of gray area.
And then finally, we have typosquatting.
That’s me buying a URL that kind of looks like another URL, and that may or may not be illegal.
It really depends on how I use it.
So if I buy something that looks close to Google and I pretend to be Google, well that’s illegal.
If I don’t pretend to be Google, I just use that website for whatever I want.
Well, then that is fine.
Which is also why a lot of large companies, they defensively buy domain names that are somewhat similar to their real domain name.