The Law: Technology, Copyright, and Intellectual Property

Definitions

Technology law

A specialty field of law that includes contract, tort, trademarks, employment, copyright, banking, constitutional and criminal law.

The specialty developed as a multidisciplinary legal area to address the unique legal issues that result from computer usage and the creation of technology.

Clickstream

data imbedded into programs that collect and store a record of the clicks made by a person surfing the website, including such information as the previous website visited, what information was viewed, and the website visited next.

Clickstream collects information without the knowledge of the person entering the data or surfing the website.

Trademark

any combination of work, name,

device, or symbol that is used to distinguish owned goods or services from those goods or services owned by others.

Arbitrary trademarks

is one of the strongest trademarks, and this trademark does not indicate the goods being labeled.

Fanciful trademarks

is another strong trademark that includes a word made up to represent the goods or services being labeled.

Suggestive trademarks

are next in the strength continuum, and as the name indicates, suggest or describe indirectly the goods or services they identify.

Descriptive trademarks

describe the goods and services they represent and must develop a secondary meaning before becoming registrable.

IP Audit

a professional analysis of the record keeping of a company’s intellectual property to determine if the copyright of the property is owned, adequately protected and at risk for litigation.

Intellectual property

intangible assets of value to a company.

HTML

hypertext markup language – the programming language used to create a website.