IP Theft Research Articles

The Global Strategy of Coca Cola

This report evaluates the global strategy for Coca-Cola, a multinational carbonated drinks brand. Coca-Cola faces competition from major players like PepsiCo, Nestle, and Red Bull. To expand its presence internationally, Coca-Cola primarily utilises licensing and joint ventures as entry modes. The company employs a combination of global and local marketing strategies to enhance its global integration and local responsiveness. However, the report recommends that to mitigate IP theft in a licensing agreement, Coca-Cola needs to conduct thorough due diligence among potential partners. Secondly, it suggests a transition towards offering healthier beverage options to align with changing consumer preferences. Lastly, the report advises Coca-Cola to adopt a transnational strategy that focuses on both global integration and local responsiveness, optimizing market opportunities while catering to specific market needs. The implementation of these recommendations will enable Coca-Cola to maintain its competitive edge, safeguard its intellectual property, tap into the growing demand for healthier drinks, and effectively navigate the complexities of diverse markets, ensuring sustained growth and success.

Network security in multiple threats: A critical study

Any organization nowadays needs a secure network. High-speed wireless networks and internet services are becoming increasingly unsafe as a result of the daily rise in security threats. Threats to information security come from within the company, in close to 80% of cases. With the latest trend of mobility (portable devices such as laptops and smartphones etc.), ubiquitous 3G connectivity and this trend increases but as more web-based applications are manufactured and available over the Internet, the instances of insider threats have been rising at an alarming rate. Current or former workers, contractors, or business partners who have permission to access the organization's network and servers are typically the source of insider threats. Confidential information is frequently stolen for monetary gain or wellful harm. Access to hacking tools via the Internet, USB drives, and wireless connectivity make break-ins simple. Here, Millions of dollars in losses in the event of IP theft, and customer / individual information theft are yet too considered. This article provides insight into Insider dangers, attackers, and their rationales and recommendations for organizational-level mitigation methods.

Optimizing the Use of Behavioral Locking for High-Level Synthesis

The globalization of the electronics supply chain requires effective methods to thwart reverse engineering and IP theft. Logic locking is a promising solution, but there are many open concerns. First, even when applied at a higher level of abstraction, locking may result in significant overhead without improving the security metric. Second, optimizing a security metric is application-dependent and designers must evaluate and compare alternative solutions. We propose a meta-framework to optimize the use of behavioral locking during the high-level synthesis (HLS) of IP cores. Our method operates on chip's specification (before HLS) and it is compatible with all HLS tools, complementing industrial EDA flows. Our meta-framework supports different strategies to explore the design space and to select points to be locked automatically. We evaluated our method on the optimization of differential entropy, achieving better results than random or topological locking: 1) we always identify a valid solution that optimizes the security metric, while topological and random locking can generate unfeasible solutions; 2) we minimize the number of bits used for locking up to more than 90% (requiring smaller tamper-proof memories); 3) we make better use of hardware resources since we obtain similar overheads but with higher security metric.

For your Eyes Only

Cyber attacks are on the rise and IP theft is a real risk for technology developers and manufacturing businesses, writes Chris Pickering

FaceTec accuses iProov of IP theft

FaceTec accuses iProov of IP theft

Buying-up Europe No More? How the European Union has Responded to the Challenges of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment

towards Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) has evolved over the past decade. I contend that the EU was quite receptive to Chinese OFDI at the beginning of the decade, due to both ideological leanings and the economic context of a post-crisis Europe. I then illustrate how the EU slowly adopted a more guarded and critical approach towards Chinese OFDI. This paper will focus specifically on four key issues surrounding Chinese OFDI policy: national security, technology transfers and IP theft, state support for Chinese firms, and market access, ultimately arguing that bilateral investment treaty (BIT) negotiations and the new EU investment screening mechanism are the main policy levers being used to address these concerns. For the sake of this paper, I will use the OECD’s definition of OFDI.

Paper of Record: Modernizing Ownership Disclosures for U.S. Patents

National security concerns often arise between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and routinely involve cutting-edge technology. These include the race to fifth-generation (5G) wireless mobile technology, cybersecurity, and IP theft; but traditionally they have not extended to patent policy writ large. As national security depends largely on innovative technologies, and patent policy fosters or hinders such innovation, the U.S. should modify its patent policies to recognize state-sponsored entities that can use U.S. patents to drain resources from domestic investment into new technologies. For instance, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) currently has no mandatory recordation requirement to identify the attributable owners of patent applications. The USPTO receives and publishes only patent ownership information that the applicant or patent owner voluntarily submits, among myriad other concerns. Given that neither the Patent Act nor USPTO regulations require any recordation of assignee information, USPTO records provide poor notice regarding current ownership of patents. Thus, the U.S. government itself does not know how many U.S. patents international companies own, license, control, or could assert in U.S. federal court. While international agreements rightfully prohibit the USPTO from discriminating against foreign applicants, the U.S. cannot be blind to the fact that patents are already serving as a strategic tool for international competitors to harass or to leverage against American companies in court, draining their financial resources by extracting royalty fees and settlements that then flow into overseas coffers. And because the U.S. government has no effective means to record, or even internally track, the number or identity of patents international companies own, license, or could assert in even sensitive technologies, the extent and potentially negative ramifications of this problem are not well understood. We analyze the serious gaps in U.S. patent recordation law and propose basic recordation solutions that U.S. government, and the USPTO in particular, could implement to address, mitigate, or, at a minimum, better understand the magnitude of this issue.

Cybersecurity Assurance in the Emerging Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) Paradigm: A Lesson from the Video Streaming Industry

Abstract The coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak has incapacitated physical supply chains of various industrial sectors. This has been a call for attention to rethinking innovative methods to improve supply chain resilience. Emerging manufacturing technologies like additive/hybrid manufacturing are enabling small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to transform into cybermanufacturing kiosks that deliver manufacturing-as-a-service by digitizing much of the manufacturing workflow (design, communication, and manufacturing). This transformation is causing a paradigm shift in which major producers and original equipment manufacturers can outsource manufacturing of components to distributed SMEs located near the point of need. The increasing reliance on a digital thread would reduce the burden of resiliency required from the physical supply chains. Although digital threads are reducing the burden on the physical supply chains, they introduce a new class of cyber-resilience requirements, chiefly in ensuring the integrity of the designs and other intellectual properties shared across the digital thread. A novel design-sharing scheme for the digital thread based on video streaming is introduced herein to address the issue of IP theft and tampering. The potential of design-sharing schemes for the improvement of the cyberresilience of digital supply chains is discussed.

Split-Chip Design to Prevent IP Reverse Engineering

Split-chip design combines integrated circuits (ICs) from two or more disparate (trusted and untrusted) foundries to create an integrated system on a chip. This approach thwarts IP theft, hardware Trojan horse (HTH) insertion, and overbuilding by any single untrustworthy foundry. This study uses two silicon demonstration vehicles in 16-nm technology as proofs of the split-chip concept.

The Dao of CSR

Abstract Widespread corporate scandals involving corruption, environmental pollution, IP theft and food/product safety demonstrate that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has not yet taken root among Chinese business firms. One major reason is that Chinese managers view CSR as a foreign concept, an externally imposed set of rules, that fails to resonate with their internal worldview. This paper proposes a new approach to CSR based on ‘vital energy’ (qi) circulating within an organically integrated moral cosmos (dao)—a traditional Chinese ecological worldview that overcomes cultural barriers to acceptance, while simultaneously drawing on insights from contemporary behavioural economics and materials science. The paper provides Chinese conceptual tools to transform an externally imposed burden on business firms into an internally generated, ecologically situated, creative and productive corporate evolution.

Taiwan arrests 6 for IP theft

Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) has arrested one current BASF staffer and five former employees for accepting bribes from a Chinese company in exchange for industrial secrets. The case...

Review on Logic Encryption Strategy Ensuring Key Interdependency

With the globalization of IC outline flow, numerous fables organizations outsource the creation of their plan to off-site foundries. As these foundries may not generally be believed, it brings about security vulnerabilities and dangers, for example, forging, IP theft, figuring out, overbuilding and Hardware Trojans. Logic encryption has developed to be a potential answer for secure the plan against these dangers. It presents some additional equipment (key-gates) into the plan to conceal the usefulness from unapproved clients, utilizing security keys. The areas of addition of key-gates decide the nature of the security gave by the subsequent plan. In this paper, we examined pros and cons of few papers and propose a productive technique to defeat the IP theft

Using Scan Side Channel to Detect IP Theft

In the growing heterogeneous Internet of Things market, which embraces a plurality of vendors and service providers, IP protection plays a central role. This paper proposes a process for the detection of IP theft in VLSI devices that exploits the internal test scan chains, designed for production test automation. The scan chains supply direct access to the internal registers in the device, enabling combinational analysis of the device logic. By using Boolean function learning methods, the learner creates a partial dependence graph of the internal flip-flops. The graph is further partitioned using the shared nearest neighbors graph clustering method, and individual blocks of combinational logic are isolated. These blocks can be matched with known building blocks that compose the original function. This enables reconstruction of the function implementation to the level of pipeline structure. The IP owner can compare the resulting structure with his own implementation to confirm whether an IP violation has occurred. We demonstrate the power of the presented approach with a test case of an open source Bitcoin SHA-256 accelerator, containing more than 80 000 registers. With the presented method, we discover the microarchitecture of the module, locate all the main components of the SHA-256 algorithm, and learn the module's flow control. In addition to the direct recognition of the IP content, we also demonstrate a combination of reverse engineering and watermark methods. We define a new watermark structure-pipeline-associated watermark (PAW), combined with pipeline stages that can be detected with the scan-based reverse engineering method.

The Global Harmonization of Trade Secret Law: The Convergence of Protections for Trade Secret Information in the United States and European Union

Victoria Cundiff litigates trade secrets disputes in state and Federal courts nationally, coordinates international trade secrets litigation, and helps clients develop alternatives to litigating trade secrets disputes. She is the Chair of AlPLA's Trade Secrets Litigation Subcommittee and is Co-Chair of the New York State Bar Association's Committee on Trade Secrets. Bradford Newman founded and leads Paul Hastings' International Employee Mobility and Trade Secret practice. He is the author of Protecting Intellectual Property in the Age of Employee Mobility: Forms and Analysis, a comprehensive treatise published by ALM that offers authoritative guidance on legal risks and practical steps companies can take to protect their IP and remedy IP theft. In connection with his national practice spanning many industries, Mr. Newman routinely serves as lead trial counsel in cases with potential eight and nine-figure liability, and has successfully litigated a broad spectrum of trade secret and employee mobility cases in state and federal courts throughout the country. Jeffrey A. Pade is an intellectual property litigator with over 20 years of experience in all phases of patent trade secrets, and other intellectual property laws. He has directed complex and international patent and trade secrets litigation strategies concerning mechanical, semiconductor, and many other technologies for clients around the globe, and actively represents international clients in intellectual property audits, investigations, and strategic initiatives. Anand B. Patel provides strategic business counseling on intellectual property disputes, investigations, and transactions, and has extensive trial and appellate experience in patent and trade secret matters. A former Federal Circuit clerk, he represents a diverse group of clients on technologies ranging from microprocessor fabrication to pharmaceuticals. ********** AS major regions across the world seek to harmonize trade secret law within and across jurisdictions, international companies now should focus on building their own uniform policies and procedures for protecting their intellectual property and defending against claims of misappropriation. Given the recent passage of the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) and the EU Trade Secrets Directive (the Directive), it is clear that both regions have recognized the substantial value of trade secrets to the global economy and have decided to take analogous stances on the basics of trade secret law, including what constitutes a trade secret and how a violation occurs. Although the similarities are not unexpected the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) (1) provides many foundational provisions there are important nuances in each locale's rules that affect how companies should consider enforcing trade secret rights and defending against misappropriation claims across those major international jurisdictions. I. Overview of the DTSA After several unsuccessful attempts over more than five years, (2) Congress in April overwhelmingly approved (3) and President Obama in May signed (4) the DTSA, which provides a Federal private right of action for trade secret misappropriation. The DTSA is incorporated into the previously-enacted Economic Espionage Act (EEA), (5) which provides criminal penalties for misappropriation. (6) The DTSA pulls heavily from the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), (7) already in force in some form in 48 states, (8) by providing similar definitions of key terms and remedies for misappropriation. (9) In addition to providing the right to sue in Federal court (importantly, without preempting parallel state law claims (10)), the DTSA provides an ex parte seizure mechanism and whistleblower immunity. II. Overview of the EU Directive In 2013, after studies (11) showed the importance of trade secrets to the economy, particularly to small and medium-sized enterprises, and the fears of many organizations that asserting claims for misappropriation would result in inadequate remedies and potentially place their trade secrets at risk of public disclosure, the European Commission proposed a Directive to address differences in the trade secret laws of the EU Member States. …

The Logic of International Intellectual Property Protection

As Intellectual Property becomes increasingly vital to our nation’s wealth and prosperity, the need to ensure its protection on a global basis increases correspondingly. The American economy suffers staggering losses each year to international IP theft. According to the IP Theft Commission (2013), these losses likely exceed $300 billion annually. IP theft is an injustice to the IP owners, diminishes economic prosperity, and undermines job opportunities. Indeed, this is a reason why it is so important to conclude international trade agreements, such as the recently-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership, that contain meaningful intellectual property protections. The Constitution expressly makes protection of intellectual property rights an imperative of the federal government. The Intellectual Property Clause contained in Article I, Section 8, provides that Congress has the power “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The IP Clause is premised on the understanding that copyrights and patent rights are property rights grounded in the intellectual and physical labors of authors and inventors. There is strong constitutional foundation for international protection of Americans’ copyrights and patent rights. The IP Clause permits protection of foreign intellectual property under federal law – or at the very least, permits it as a means of securing American IP rights abroad. Federal legal recognition of foreign IP constitutes fair play. As a matter of common sense and experience, doing justice, and providing comparable treatment to rights of foreigners facilitates foreign cooperation to protect American IP rights. Treaty-making with foreign nations constitutes another critical constitutional mechanism for securing international protections for Americans’ IP rights.

Speedy recovery: retrieving lost emails as part of an investigation

Recovering data for an investigative matter can be like finding a hidden leaf in a forest. Added to this burden is when that data has been removed or deleted. Emails are often the first point of evidence in cases relating to fraud, IP theft, extraction of customer data or corruption. But what happens if these emails have been deleted? There are steps that organisations can take to achieve effective data recovery and ensure that they are forensic-ready. Significantly, there are also procedures that organisations can follow to prevent data loss and ensure that information is available in a timely matter should an investigation arise, explains John Shaw of First Advantage Litigation Consulting. With the rise of the digital age and the widespread use of computers and electronic communication by individuals and corporations, the volume of emails and business correspondence electronically stored is growing exponentially. As a result, emails are one of the most common forms of documentary evidence requested and admitted as evidence in court, in the same way as other forms of evidentiary data. This means that, with tighter procedural requirements relating to electronic evidence, the way data is stored and recovered plays an integral role in complying with a legal or regulatory investigation.

IP crime: the new face of organized crime: From IP theft to IP crime

IP crime: the new face of organized crime: From IP theft to IP crime

In brief

Including brief stories on: Microsoft face lawsuit over slammer in South Korea SCO suffer denial-of-service attack IBM and SCO clash over IP theft Ex-employee hacks in “retaliation” Hacker caught at UK Infosec show

Former executive guilty of IP theft

Former executive guilty of IP theft