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Registering this type of IP in one of the legal categories will give software and system vendors some level of protection, but cannot provide any means of immediate enforcement. Companies may not be aware when their IP is exposed or stolen and falls into the hands of the competition. Nevertheless, the damage will have been done and by the time the felony becomes known it will probably be too late. What might result in years of lawsuits and litigation cannot—and will not—restore the value of the stolen asset.
To reduce the risk of losing profits and competitive edge, and to eliminate dangers of theft and violation, strong software and IP protection solutions must be implemented by software and system vendors. Solutions that surpass legal protection requirements, and offer powerful technology that ensures enforcement, must be applied.
Software Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions are the de-facto standard today for protecting software IP. From a broad perspective, DRM offers technological solutions for limiting the unrestricted use and transfer of digital content. Software DRM provides additional benefits as it offers solutions that prevent software piracy, protect IP and enable software licensing and compliance.
Industrial espionage–a genuine threat Since software can be reverse engineered, IP embedded in software requires protection. Reverse engineering of software involves deconstructing a program's machine code and exposing the source code in which it was written. Legitimate reverse engineering of software is commonly performed to retrieve the source code of a program because the source code was lost, to study how the program executes certain operations, to improve the performance of a program, or to fix a bug.
To enable these operations, reverse engineering tools such as dumpers and disassemblers are readily available to software engineers, and are used in their day-to-day work.
Conversely, reverse engineering tools are also used to unlawfully copy and duplicate programs, steal knowledge, secrets, and algorithms. Business competitors also put significant effort into reverse engineering the opposition's product, examining its secrets, and preparing a rapid response so that a competitor's advantage will not endure.
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