Article Review

In today’s business world, the use of technology has changed how transactions take place between consumers and businesses. The capability to do business on the Internet has opened the gates for companies to grow at faster rates by making products and services available to consumers on demand. Although the Internet has allowed quick expansion to many business sectors, the growth of such capabilities has also presented a different set of issues. Protecting intellectual property for these types of business transactions has proven to be challenging. Common types of intellectual property protection include copyright, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights, trade dress, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets. Legislatures have educated themselves with priority, on the differences in commerce and e-commerce. The following article review will reveal what is becoming more apparent as consumers persistently demand instaneous e-commerce products and services.

Intellectual-property Protection Opens Path for E-commerce

One of the fastest growing e-commerce businesses today is the sale of music, documents, software,and other forms of intellectual property. Vendors of such products are faced with how to protect this intellectual property that they are selling over the internet from people who copy, forward, or resell without authorization. This is an issue because digital technologies allow original quality reproductions. Billions of dollars are lost to piracy every year (Lawton,2000). Some companies protect their intellectual property by encrypting and defining user rights. Some key concepts being developed to protect intellectual property are through trust systems, java-based encryption technologies, flexible, hardware-based technologies, and software registration codes. Some legal concerns that have come about with the development of intellectual property protection technologies is that copyright owners gain too much control which could lead to the Web becoming less open and more difficult or impossible to access many documents, photo images, audio, and video for fair-use purposes. Another concern is that consumers will lose access for academic or other