Tony Sykes discusses strategies for identifying intellectual property theft
Over the last three years IT Group has seen a significant increase in the number of instructions relating to software theft. Increasingly, we are deploying techniques over and above the basic test of whether or not in our opinion two pieces of code are substantially the same, whether one derived from the other or whether they contain shareware available in the public domain. Those techniques include the analysis of “white space”, the investigation of the potential theft process (e-mail, FTP, USB etc.), the analysis of circumvention techniques and forensic dating—which came first? This short article discusses these techniques and how they apply to the available legislation—the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988) and the amendments arising from the EU Copyright Directive.
While the ultimate test is the application of one or more measures offered by CDPA 1988, the uncovering of the tracks to show that the original work was stolen, removed, or copied often provides very persuasive supporting evidence.
“White space” analysis
White space is the term used to describe the regions
