Intellectual Property Infringement Research Articles

Intellectual Property Law's Confiscatory Losses: Its Application in Dynamic Network Environments

This paper discusses confiscatory losses in the dynamic network enforcement of intellectual property (IP). IP law protects copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Instead, IP enforcement may consequence in "confiscatory damages." This occurs when the defendant's property is apprehended pursuant to a court order. For both individuals and companies, the internet has made sharing and disseminating innovative creations simpler. IP infringement is also increased by this. In these circumstances, IP law enforcement has become more crucial. Penalisations and sanctions for IP infringement in these conditions may be severe and upshot in confiscatory losses. So as to apply confiscatory losses in dynamic network conditions, this paper suggests reviewing IP law enforcement strategies. Hence, IP infringement penalisations and compensation should be proportionate to the harm caused and avoid confiscatory losses. Moreover, IP infringement can also be minimized by education, information, and alternative dispute resolution. IP law enforcement in dynamic network systems must strike a compromise between protecting IP rights and sidestepping confiscatory damages. 

Analyzing Appraisal Resources in the Judgment Discourse of Ulysses Copyright Infringement Case

In this economic society, intellectual property protection play an important role in maintaining the national economic order and promoting social development. The infringement of intellectual property will bring great harm to the public and national interests. This study aims to analyze the appraisal resources in the court judgment of Ulysses copyright infringement case, especially from the perspective of attitude and engagement system. By adopting a descriptive and exploratory approach, the study investigates how attitude and engagement resources serve the declaratory and justificatory functions of court judgments. It is found that appreciation and judgement in attitude system are widely used in this court judgment, while affect is seldom applied for it deals with people’s personal feelings. For engagement, disclaim and entertain resources are applied from time to time in processing the judge’s objective fact analysis. It also shows that the court can effectively arrive at judgments with justice when the court professionals have better knowledge and make proper use of the appraisal resources. It is hoped that this study can arouse the awareness of legal professionals to maintain their law-based role of justice in copyright cases by the proper application of appraisal resources in their distinctive language.

IPRemover: A Generative Model Inversion Attack against Deep Neural Network Fingerprinting and Watermarking

Training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) can be expensive when data is difficult to obtain or labeling them requires significant domain expertise. Hence, it is crucial that the Intellectual Property (IP) of DNNs trained on valuable data be protected against IP infringement. DNN fingerprinting and watermarking are two lines of work in DNN IP protection. Recently proposed DNN fingerprinting techniques are able to detect IP infringement while preserving model performance by relying on the key assumption that the decision boundaries of independently trained models are intrinsically different from one another. In contrast, DNN watermarking embeds a watermark in a model and verifies IP infringement if an identical or similar watermark is extracted from a suspect model. The techniques deployed in fingerprinting and watermarking vary significantly because their underlying mechanisms are different. From an adversary's perspective, a successful IP removal attack should defeat both fingerprinting and watermarking. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no work on such attacks in the literature yet. In this paper, we fill this gap by presenting an IP removal attack that can defeat both fingerprinting and watermarking. We consider the challenging data-free scenario whereby all data is inverted from the victim model. Under this setting, a stolen model only depends on the victim model. Experimental results demonstrate the success of our attack in defeating state-of-the-art DNN fingerprinting and watermarking techniques. This work reveals a novel attack surface that exploits generative model inversion attacks to bypass DNN IP defenses. This threat must be addressed by future defenses for reliable IP protection.

Model Access Control Based on Hidden Adversarial Examples for Automatic Speech Recognition

DNNs have achieved remarkable success across various domains, and their commercial value has led to their classification as intellectual property (IP) for their creators. While model watermarking is commonly employed for DNN IP protection, it is limited to post-hoc forensics. In contrast, model access control offers a more effective, proactive approach to prevent IP infringement through authentication. However, existing model access control methods primarily focus on image classification models and are not suitable for automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, which are also widely used in commercial applications. To address the above limitation, inspired by audio adversarial examples, we propose the first model access control scheme for IP protection of ASR models, which utilizes audio adversarial examples with target labels as user identity information, serving as identity-proof samples. However, a unique challenge arises in the form of interception attacks, in which an attacker detects and hijacks an authorized sample to bypass the authentication process. To remedy it, we introduce the hidden adversarial examples (HAEs) for authentication, which embed the authorized information by slightly modifying the logits and behaving like clean audios, thereby making them difficult to be detected by analyzing the predicted results. To further evade detection by steganalysis, which can be employed for adversarial example detection, we design a distortion cost function inspired by adaptive steganography to guide the generation of HAEs. We conduct extensive experiments on the open-source ASR system DeepSpeech, demonstrating that our proposed scheme effectively protects ASR models proactively and is resistant to unique interception attacks.

Intellectual Property Protection in the Transformation of Medical Scientific and Technological Achievements

In the transformation of medical scientific and technological achievements, intellectual property disputes caused by improper protection of intellectual property rights are common, which have seriously affected the efficiency of the transformation of medical scientific and technological achievements. Therefore, this article takes the importance of intellectual property protection in the process of transformation of medical scientific and technological achievements as an entry point, analyzes the current intellectual property infringement behaviors and manifestations, puts forward specific solutions, and improves the efficiency of the transformation of medical scientific and technological achievements.

Activities of Intellectual Property Propaganda in the Vocational Education System

Currently, intellectual property violations are serious and tend to increase, especially in the education system, including the vocational education system. Lack of understanding of intellectual property regulations has unintentionally led to many cases of violation without even knowing it. This is necessary to improve people’s understanding of intellectual property and have appropriate behavior. This shows that appropriate propaganda activities are needed to improve this situation. Based on reference to State documents on intellectual property; surveying 300 people who are students, teachers, staff, and administrators at several vocational education institutions, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the current situation, point out the position, role, and importance the importance of intellectual property propaganda activities in the vocational education system, pointing out the causes of limitations and inadequacies; from there, propose solutions to improve the quality of intellectual property propaganda activities in the vocational education system in the future.

SecureNet: Proactive intellectual property protection and model security defense for DNNs based on backdoor learning

With the widespread application of deep neural networks (DNNs), the risk of privacy breaches against DNN models is constantly on the rise, resulting in an increasing need for intellectual property (IP) protection for such models. Although neural network watermarking techniques are widely used to safeguard the IP of DNNs, they can only achieve passive protection and cannot actively prevent unauthorized users from illicit use or embezzlement of the trained DNN models. Therefore, the development of proactive protection techniques to prevent IP infringement is imperative. To this end, we propose SecureNet, a key-based access license framework for DNN models. The proposed approach involves injecting license keys into the model through backdoor learning, enabling correct model functionality only when the appropriate license key is included in the input. To ensure the reusability of DNN models, we also propose a license key replacement algorithm. In addition, based on SecureNet, we designed defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a fine-grained authorization method that enables flexible granting of model permissions to different users. We have designed four license-key schemes with different privileges, tailored to various scenarios. We evaluated SecureNet on five benchmark datasets including MNIST, Cifar10, Cifar100, FaceScrub, and CelebA, and assessed its performance on six classic DNN models: LeNet-5, VGG16, ResNet18, ResNet101, NFNet-F5, and MobileNetV3. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art model parameter encryption methods by at least 95% in terms of computational efficiency. Additionally, it provides effective defense against adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks without compromising the model’s overall performance.

Inward foreign direct investment and domestic entrepreneurship in China: the moderating role of intellectual property infringement hazards

Purpose The scholarly debate regarding the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on entrepreneurship remains inconclusive. This study aims to tackle this discrepancy by positing that the relationship between inward FDI and entrepreneurship in the host nation is not deterministic but is moderated by intellectual property rights (IPR) infringement hazards. These hazards are postulated to dictate the level of knowledge spillovers from inward FDI, thereby affecting entrepreneurial activities. Design/methodology/approach This study uses panel data regression analysis using data spanning 30 Chinese provinces from 2010 to 2018. The Hausman test results rejected the null hypothesis, recommending the use of the fixed-effects estimator over the random-effects one for statistical consistency. Therefore, the fixed-effects estimator is used to test the hypotheses. Findings The study’s analysis reveals that the main effect of inward FDI on entrepreneurship is statistically insignificant. However, once IPR infringement hazards are introduced to the model as a moderator, the main effect turns statistically positive and significant. Notably, the positive main effect diminishes as IPR infringement hazards increase. Originality/value Highlighting the role of IPR infringement hazards as a moderator, this research unveils the nuanced relationship between inward FDI and entrepreneurship, thereby addressing the ongoing theoretical debate. This study demonstrates that knowledge spillovers from inward FDI are not automatic but depend on concerns about IPR infringements in the host nation. The resultant spillovers are then translated into entrepreneurial activities.

Digital Publishing and the New Academic Ecosystem: An ANT Approach to the Recent Disputes over a Chinese Journal Database Giant

As digital publishing gains momentum globally, it presents unique challenges in different regions and cultures. To address these challenges, it is important to understand the specificities of each local context. In light of Actor Network Theory (ANT), which advocates an interdisciplinary approach through an association of related factors from different fields, this article examines problems of Chinese digital publishing, focusing on one giant database, called the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). The discussion falls into three parts. First, the self-positioning of CNKI. As the sole academic database giant, it encounters a dilemma between making profits and serving the public – it has been criticized for charging high subscription fees and for committing intellectual property infringements. Second, the scholars, while becoming more dependent on digital publishing and such a giant database as CNKI, are bewildered by the fact that they become less capable of protecting their academic autonomy as well as their intellectual copyright. Third, CNKI’s near monopoly has damaged domestic academic justice, which becomes detrimental to the development of Chinese academic journals and the international transmission of Chinese scholarship. The article concludes with an inquiry into possible solutions for building a new academic ecosystem in the digital era, locally as well as globally.

Training Human Resources for Market Surveillance in South Central Coast, Vietnam

In the context of increasingly deepening international economic integration, the current situation of violations related to smuggling, trade fraud, counterfeit goods, and intellectual property infringement is a pressing issue. It demands the presence of a market management team equipped with the necessary capabilities to address these challenges. Therefore, the Market Surveillance force needs to proactively research programs to fundamentally change the methods and quality of training and development for market surveillance officials. Through a survey of 380 questionnaires conducted with individual market surveillance officials in the Market Surveillance Departments of South-Central Coast, the article has assessed the current status of human resource training for market surveillance in South Central Coast. It has identified variations in the capacity and professional qualifications of market surveillance officials in some units. There are cases where officials exhibit lax management practices, failure to adhere to regulations in operational activities, leading to errors in the inspection and handling of administrative violations. The methods and tactics employed by subjects are becoming more sophisticated, making the inspection and control activities of the market surveillance force more passive. Based on this foundation, the article also proposes solutions to address and mitigate these issues. Keywords: Training human resources, Market Surveillance, South Central Coast, Vietnam

Protection of Well-Known Trademarks under the Internet

As the digital age advances, many trademark registrants have utilized the Internet as a medium to increase the visibility of their trademarks and brands, thereby obtaining greater benefits compared to traditional methods of trademark display, such as physical advertisements and television broadcasts. However, the Internet has also expanded the forms of trademark infringement while breaking down the territorial protection limitations of traditional trademark rights. Well-known trademarks, due to their own popularity and prominence, make them the first target of intellectual property infringement in the Internet environment. And due to the lag in legislation, the trademark infringement caused by the Internet will encounter obstacles in the process of defending rights. Therefore, this paper analyzes the protection of well-known trademarks in the context of the Internet by means of theoretical analysis and overview analysis. At the same time, it takes the problems expected in the protection of well-known trademarks in China as an example and provides corresponding measures to solve the problems. Relative protection is adopted for unregistered well-known trademarks, and with their own higher goodwill and trademark value, well-known trademarks should be given special protection. Extending the protection of well-known trademarks to the network environment is the inevitable development trend of well-known trademark protection.

Counterfeit drugs: Violation of Intellectual property and an urge for specific legislation.

Counterfeit drugs: Violation of Intellectual property and an urge for specific legislation.

FOSTERING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AWARENESS IN ACADEMIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP

The importance of Intellectual Property (IP) in academic entrepreneurship, emphasises a need for specialised knowledge of IP law in university Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), and general awareness of IP rules amongst university researchers, research assistants, and other university personnel. This helps not only in preventing the inadvertent loss of valuable IP, but also the infringement of IP owned by other parties, which could result in costly law suits. Equally, knowledge of IP law is indispensable to the effective negotiation of licences, and the drafting of contracts that cater for the interests of both universities and industry. The objective of this article is, accordingly, to provide academic entrepreneurs with insights into IP regimes. This should help them in identifying valuable IP, and in ensuring that protection is not compromised. It will also help in determining the modes of protection suitable for particular forms of IP, how to manage acquired rights, and tackle infringements. In the following sections, we discuss these issues from the perspectives of several jurisdictions. Traversing our discussion is an examination of university IP policies, and relevant case law, which should enhance understanding. The last segment of the article concludes and reiterates the importance of IP awareness in academic entrepreneurship. Therefore, this article aims at fostering awareness of IP regimes amongst academic entrepreneurs.

Parallel import in Russia’s software industry: Expected consequences

Amid the withdrawal of foreign software developers from the Russian market, policymakers continue to discuss the option of legalising software parallel import. The purpose of the article is to assess the expected effects of the software parallel import introduction. The methodological basis of the study is industrial organization theory and new institutional economics theory. Among the research methods are theoretical and mathematical modelling and comparative analysis. The empirical evidence includes publicly available data on the pirated content consumption retrieved from the web source I Know (iknowwhatyoudownload.com) and financial statements of Russian software developers (SPARK-Interfax database). The article presents a theoretical model describing the consumer’s choice between original and pirated versions of programs and analyses the situation, where the most popular software product gets inaccessible. Our analysis shows that when costs of piracy are low, users of ‘out-of-the-box’ programs will not switch to another software and prefer the pirated version of the previously used program. The results of the model are compared with data on the pirated software consumption in Russia. We have found that consumers prefer foreign software to Russian counterparts, which means that if parallel import is legalised, Russian software developers will fail to occupy the niche of home-use software, which remains an important reserve for the industry’s further development. Free access to foreign software distorts consumer incentives. The institution of parallel imports should be modified so that the consumer keeps paying the price of the original’s, the state guarantees such software is secure, and intellectual property violations are strictly controlled.

A Robustness-Assured White-Box Watermark in Neural Networks

Recently, stealing highly-valuable and large-scale deep neural network (DNN) models becomes pervasive. The stolen models may be re-commercialized, e.g., deployed in embedded devices, released in model markets, utilized in competitions, etc, which infringes the Intellectual Property (IP) of the original owner. Detecting IP infringement of the stolen models is quite challenging, even with the white-box access to them in the above scenarios, since they may have experienced fine-tuning, pruning, functionality-equivalent adjustment to destruct any embedded watermark. Furthermore, the adversaries may also attempt to extract the embedded watermark or forge a similar watermark to falsely claim ownership. In this paper, we propose a novel DNN watermarking solution, named <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$HufuNet$</tex-math></inline-formula> , to detect IP infringement of DNN models against the above mentioned attacks. Furthermore, HufuNet is the first one theoretically proved to guarantee robustness against fine-tuning attacks. We evaluate HufuNet rigorously on four benchmark datasets with five popular DNN models, including convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN). The experiments and analysis demonstrate that HufuNet is highly robust against model fine-tuning/pruning, transfer learning, kernels cutoff/supplement, functionality-equivalent attacks and fraudulent ownership claims, thus highly promising to protect large-scale DNN models in the real world.

The crime-as-communication approach: Challenging the idea of online routine activities by taking communication seriously

In mediated environments, a simple but important understanding holds true: there is plenty of communication without crime, yet no crime without communication. Put differently, the criminal act in technology-mediated environments is always concurrently a communicative act. Nevertheless, descriptions of online activities and their role in studies of cybercrime often only amount to what can be considered lazy signifiers: online banking is not a single activity, but a series of requests for information made to, and responses received from, servers through the use of one’s networked device. The user’s interpretations of the content form the basis for deciding on the next action(-as-communication). Available theoretical approaches, notably the routine activities approach, lack this type of specificity in considering as a meaningful whole something that is better understood as its constitutive elements – messages in communicative exchanges. Hence, the current theoretical status quo hinders rather than contributes to cybercrime-related thought and research. Rather than fitting a ‘terrestrial’ understanding of action onto acts of cybercrime, the crime-as-communication approach instead builds a communication-based foundation for understanding action in technology-mediated environments. By making explicit the communication processes that constitute cybercrime, crime-as-communication offers a principled way of analysing mediated crime specifically, and action in mediated environments more broadly. This approach has practical implications for research and policy-making concerning economic crimes like fraud and intellectual property violations, interpersonal crimes such as harassing pursuit and criminal threats, computer offences like unauthorised access and offences against peace and public order, including incitement to hatred and disinformation or propaganda for war.

Financial Technology (Fintech) and Cybersecurity: A Systematic Literature Review.

This research aims to identify the threats posed by cybercrime to the fintech sector, as well as the preventative measures taken by the industry in the form of cybersecurity. This study employs a systematic literature review approach to analyzing previously published publications on cybercrime and cybersecurity in the financial technology industry. The survey found that cybercrime issues in the fintech industry include lax cybercrime rules, theft of data and information, and infringement of intellectual property. Proactive measures strengthened legislation, and establishing a trustworthy cybersecurity framework or system may all be used to combat cybercrime in the fintech industry.&#x0D; This study's findings may serve as a resource for academics, practitioners, regulators, and fintech players interested in learning more about the evolution of cybercrime and cybersecurity in the financial technology sector. While this study does an excellent job of summarizing and expanding upon the research findings in each chosen article, it needs to analyze the connections between the pieces. Broadening the scope of the article under evaluation, using other literature review techniques, or doing more empirical research are all viable options for recommending additional studies to corroborate the findings of the current one.

The Creative Paradox of AI: Enabler or Disruptor of Human Imagination?

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in communication and its effects on the market for creative jobs are covered in this article. While AI-generated pictures offer numerous advantages, such as efficiency and flexibility, the article emphasizes that they can have ethical consequences, such as deceit, stereotyping, illicit data usage, and intellectual property infringement. The essay goes into further detail on the problems of copyright, artistic credit, and imitation when using AI to create artwork. The dispute over whether robots can actually produce works of art or can only imitate human creativity is also discussed in the essay, raising concerns about the very nature of creativity. The paper concludes by highlighting the significance of analyzing the ethical implications of emerging technology.

PCB Security Modules for Reverse-Engineering Resistant Design

As the crisis of confidence and trust in overseas foundries arises, the industry and academic community are paying increasing attention to Printed Circuit Board (PCB) security. PCB, the backbone of any electronic system hardware, always draws attackers’ attention as it carries system and design information. Numerous ways of PCB tampering (e.g., adding/replacing a component, eavesdropping on a trace and bypassing a connection) can lead to more severe problems, such as Intellectual Property (IP) violation, password leaking, the Internet of Things (IoT) attacks or even more. This paper proposes a technique of active self-defense PCB modules with zero performance overhead. Those protection modules will only be activated when the boards are exposed to the attacks. A set of PCBs with proposed protection modules is fabricated and tested to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the techniques.

챗GPT에(게) 묻다

This review examines the meaning of ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI, and Professor Kim Dae-sik, a brain scientist, exchanged questions and answers on topics such as human relations, love, and happiness, risks facing mankind, God's existence and death. First, we asked ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft's search engine “Newbing” to write a book review on “The Future of Mankind Ask ChatGPT,” and then analyzed the contents and composition of each answer. The book review written by ChatGPT was presented in the form of “Overall Introduction-Book Composition Method and Theme-Limitations and Significance of ChatGPT-General Review,” and the flow of the article was generally smooth, but it was difficult to find the writer’s fresh perspective. Google’s Bard article confirmed that the text generation method of artificial intelligence chatbots focuses on universal summaries and simple and clear explanations rather than individuality and originality. Microsoft’s search engine “Newbing,” based on the GPT-4 model, specifically cited the contents of the book to increase reliability and reveal the source in consideration of the issue of intellectual property infringement.&#x0D; Looking at the conversation scenes between humans and machines, I thought about the significance of the conversation. In order for “ask-answer” to be a process of generating meaning, curiosity, and curiosity about not only oneself but also others and the world must be placed behind it. In addition, to continue the conversation, a literacy ability to discover meaning is required, and literacy presupposes the ability to read between the lines and grasp contextual knowledge. This eventually requires the imagination to fill the gap and the overall perspective to grasp the relationship between the part and the whole, the part and the part. The process of finding meaning is the ability to think about surplus and outside and grasp the context, and if you say one thing, it is no different from the sense of recognizing heat. The sensibility that knows how to capture nuances belongs to the realm of humanism, which is essential for humans to sense and judge an object or phenomenon.&#x0D; Therefore, Professor Kim Dae-sik’s conclusion in “Epilogue II” of “The Future of Humanity Ask ChatGPT” has great implications. The eye to distinguish the voices of individuals, which contain nuances subtly different from those that “probabilistic parrots” imitate plausibly, is based on humanities knowledge that cannot be easily filled with the names of efficiency, probability, and practicality. To exist as thinking human beings, we realize again that we must ask ‘why’ rather than ‘what’ and rely on the logic of coincidence and the specific context of life, not on the axis of stochastic thinking. And at the core of it, there is humanity that repeatedly asks and answers with a long-term perspective.