Chapter 4 | Intellectual Property

Defining Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property (IP) is a “creation of the mind: inventions; literary and artistic works; and symbols, names and images used in commerce” [1]. This encompasses designs, computer programs and software, inventions, and other original creations.

While it is generally acknowledged that there is a natural right to both physical and intellectual property, the growth of collaborative inventions has created a gray area as far as computing is concerned. Within this gray area are inventions created by multiple individuals such as robots and new computing hardware/software, which do not explicitly spell out rights to them, leaving it unclear what violates these rights and what does not.

In the Context of the Film

While the movie never explicitly addresses the idea of intellectual property, a few scenes in 21 call attention to this topic and the importance of attributing intellectual property rights to the correct parties.

Intellectual Property Consideration in Competition

In 21, the main character Ben is involved in a science competition called “2.09” with two of his friends. They are working on building an autonomous robot together, which has been going on for over a year. When creating this robot, and using it in competition, they had to create everything themselves and be careful not to infringe on any intellectual property laws.

A twist occurs later in the movie when Ben is kicked off of the team due to his lack of involvement. While Ben had previously contributed to the project, the extent of his contributions is not entirely known. This brings up potential legal implications between him and his team regarding whether his contributions can still be used on the product that is entered into competition, "this is just as much mine as it is yours" (21 1:21:26).

According to an article in WIPO Magazine on Collaboration in intellectual property, a key lesson from working on new intellectual property in collaboration is requiring independent licensing for anything that is to be owned by one party [2]. Despite the high stakes, Ben's team approached this as more of an informal collaboration, so when he is kicked off of the team, he loses any right to the work he contributed to the project, since it was not independently licensed. As a result, when his team wins the competition without him, he does not have any right to claim intellectual property over the final product.

Real World Context

MIT annually holds a $100k competition, which has significant real-life IP applications, due to the large sum of prize money granted to the winner. Prior to the competition, MIT holds a meeting with the participants going over the IP implications, addressing how anything a participant creates and enters is their own IP; if they use any MIT-owned IP, however, they must disclose this to the competition [3]. MIT provides its students with guides on IP Ownership to help protect its students and the university as much as possible. Assuming this competition is similar to that in the movie, these would be the same or similar steps that Ben and his team would have gone through for the 2.09 Competition.

Defining Trade Secrets

• A piece of intellectual property (information) that a company keeps confidential in the interest of creating and/or protecting a competitive advantage that economic value can be derived from

Once a trade secret is publicized, unlike other kinds of intellectual property that are still protected, anyone can use and benefit from it.

Casinos, like all business ventures, have many trade secrets, among them: their marketing strategy and customer loyalty database. Another type of proprietary information that casinos have actively protect and file as trade secrets are their Probability Accounting Reports (PARs). PARs, which are disclosed to the casinos by the manufacturers, determine slot machines' pay out over time using settings of theoretical hold and theoretical payback percentages.

These PARs can, however, be relatively simply reverse-engineered using floor data for the slot machine, mathematical formulas contingent on the player loyalty programs, or video deconstruction of the machine in play. This raises an important question of whether trade secret protection of PARs is pointless because they are reverse engineer-able. The answer to this is no, it is still very worthwhile to protect these settings because the methods described above to reverse engineer them would require an employee to secretly go about it, so even if one were to disclose the trade secret, they would encounter massive legal trouble for how they came to acquire it.

References
[1] Michael Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, 8/e (Pearson, 2020), p 167. Accessed 18 April 2021.

[2] Josh Lerner, Collaboration in Intellectual Property: an Overview, (WIPO, 2012), https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2012/06/article_0008.html. Accessed 18 April 2021.

[3] IP Considerations for MIT $100k Competitors, (MIT, 2021), https://tlo.mit.edu/learn-about-intellectual-property/information-students/ip-considerations-mit-100k competitors%3Futm_source%3Dyoutube%26utm_medium%3Dvideo%26utm_campaign%3D100k. Accessed 18 April 2021.