Answers
First Part:
Ethics refers to the principle of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors. At its simplest, ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives. Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy.
Second Part:
Patient: A patent grants the owner an exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind an invention for 20 years. The intent behind patent law is to ensure that inventors receive the full financial and other rewards and yet still make widespread use of the invention possible for those wishing to use the idea under license from the patent‘s owner. The granting of a patent is determined by the Patent
Office and relies on court rulings. The key concepts in patent law are originality, novelty, and invention. Patent protection is that it grants a monopoly on the underlying concepts and ideas of software. The difficulty is passing stringent criteria for novelty and invention.
Trademark: Any intellectual work product used for a business purpose can be classified as a trade secret, provided it is not based on information in the public domain. Protections for trade secrets vary from state to state. In general, trade secret laws grant a monopoly on the ideas behind a work product, but it can be a very tenuous monopoly. Software that contains novel or unique elements, procedures, or compilations can be included as a trade secret. Trade secret law protects the actual ideas in a work product, not only their manifestation. However, in the case of computer software, it is difficult to prevent the ideas from falling into the public domain when the software is widely distributed.
i. Copyright: Copyright is a statutory grant that protects creators of intellectual property from having their work copied by others for any purpose during the life of the author plus an additional 70 years after the author‘s death. For corporate-owned works, copyright protection lasts for 95 years after their initial creation. Most industrial nations have their own copyright laws, and there are several international conventions and bilateral agreements through which nations coordinate and enforce their laws. Copyright protects against copying of entire software programs or their parts; However, the ideas behind a work are not protected, only their manifestation in a work; A competitor can build new software that follows the same concepts without infringing on a copyright.