'Complacent' businesses turn blind eye on IP crime, says UK.gov The government has accused UK businesses of not doing enough to protect their intellectual property. According to new research commissioned by the Intellectual Property Office’s IP crime group, many companies understand the need to protect IP but fail to do anything about it. It found 40 per cent of individuals surveyed took …
With telcos like VM/BT/TalkTalk plotting to copy wholesale the intellectual property of all web sites, all online publishers, and all ecommerce firms... its not just little people who are breaking the law.
The UK IPO should focus some of its ire toward telcos and other commercial concerns who are engaged in mass intellectual property crime, and stop being quite so complacent itself?
that businesses should be the Police force / Trading standards.
Wonder how it would stand up in an industrial tribunal?
"yes we sacked him becuase he flogged a dodgy copy of Pirates fo the Caribean to his mates"
I think businesses have other things to worry about, say for example, staying in business.
I'd rather the Government spent a bit more time stopping Junk and dodgy scams on the internet than pandering to a significantly weathly minority of Companies who's rapacious pricing screws the general public and the majority of small and medium sized companies who are juat to big to ignore them and just to small to fight.
A bit more attention by the government and its Civil servants to protecting UK PLC from companies abroad executing "IP" and Physical theft wouldn't go amiss, either
I run a couple of websites, and I 'd love to protect my IP - but when I complain to the government about it being ripped off by the unauthorised wholesale copying of my content, using my domain name without consent in forged cookies that pretend to be from my site, and the making of derivatve works (user profiles) based on the copying and profiling of the IP on my sites, they turn a blind eye. Neither the police, DBERR, Home Office nor the ICO nor any other regulator seem interested. But then when the perpetrators are a large UK ISP and a company called Phorm, and the means being used is Webwise, no one seems to take it seriously.
The government concerned about copyright theft? What a joke! They may be concerned about helping large music/media companies protect their IP, but they certainly don't care about small businesses or charities whose websites have been copied without their consent by Webwise/Phorm.
Maybe they will see the error of their ways when the copyright cases start rolling in to the ISP's once Webwise is rolled out to a few million customersnext year (if it is).
Another very muddled message, where by lumping all the issues together as "Intellectual Property" the message is made less clear.
On the one hand, they are saying that companies are missing out on protection by not registering trademarks, or filing patents - this may well be true. Then this is strangely lumped together with "companies are turning a blind eye to copyright infringement".
These are very different messages, and lumping them together as "protecting intellectual property" is crass and wrong.
"Intellectual property is central to the UK economy..."
No it's not. UK imports more IP related goods than it exports and the IP related exports ARE TINY. By talking about trademarks they fluff the numbers, but trademarks are attached to goods, and I'm pushed to think of major UK trademarks on goods.... Apple American, Nike, American, Philips, Dutch, Nokia, Finnish, Bosch, German, Revlon, American, Calvin Klein, American, IKEA Sweden, Ford, American, BMW, German, no brands, no computer brands, no devices, no cars, Scottish Whiskey perhaps? Some drinks brands that Interbrew hasn't bought yet?
" and therefore businesses of all sizes cannot afford to be complacent in respecting its value - "
And therefore they can, indeed they would be better off concentrating on their own businesses right now rather than trying to do your work too. The gains to be made by wasting money are so small as to be unmeasurable.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_economy/Mq10Q208.pdf
WHQB / WHQH Motion picture and video production export 165 million, imports 208 million, DEFICIT (0.25% of exports)
WHPX / WHQD, Software consultancy and supply, exports 23 million, imports 41 million, DEFICIT (0.04% of exports)
Same across the board, deficits in all IP goods and the value of IP related goods is tiny compared to exports.
Another thing, if ever you wanted to see the effect of NuLabour attack on the IT industry and all that sh*t they pulled with pensions, IR35, nasty anti people laws, see the IT numbers.....
Software & service: 2005: 555 million, 2006: 397 million , 2007: 132 million
i.e. UK exports tailed off as IT industry moved out until you fell into deficit. Just think for a second, if you are an IT professional earning 100k a year, and you left the UK, you would be 0.076% of UK exports lost..... a bigger portion than the 0.04% UK software is to UK exports.
136 million would be only 1360 IT people leaving the UK for a less oppressive country.
Every one on my intellectual properties carries the copyright sign and the word copyright yet I have correspondence from BT plc assuring me that they intend to use my IP as much as they like and not offer any compensation: just because a copy of my IP has been published on the internet it is fair game for BT to harvest and use for their own financial profit.
If I show the letter to the IP Office, do you think that they will stand in my corner and help me to fight for my IP rights?
I'm sure I've read somewhere that BT Group (as part of their Webwise Phorm interception trial) say that anything on the web means they can assume consent to copy it and use it?
The UK Government needs to wake up and maybe even have some conversations between departments. What a load of rubbish.
"if you are an IT professional earning 100k a year"
Then you are probably a government contractor working on yet another useless, over-budget IT project; making sure you pay tax on the same basis as everyone else is the only way the government can recoup some of the wasted money. Stop whinging about IR35!
a high percentage of individuals in the UK (probably a majority judging from their actions, rather than their words), have no respect for government imposed monopoly laws relating to copyright infringement.
And with a full blown recession underway, that percentage will only get higher.
Still, at least the government can still keep producing these misdirection press releases whenever it wants, to avoid the real issues of the day being discussed.
...if it didn't cost an absolute fuckton of money to secure one IP rights, companies would be more inclined to go down that route.
The truth is it costs a megafuckton of wonga to get a patent, and your product will *still* be ripped off by some chinese sweat shop who couldn't give a flying fuck about your IP.
UK businesses know this already. Why don't the government?
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