Ontologies for intellectual property rights protection

Abstract

Pirating various forms of intellectual property (IP) causes great economic loss to intellectual property rights (IPR) holders. IPR protection is becoming a key issue in our highly networked world. In order to further deepen our understanding of how to protect IPR and enhance information interchange and knowledge sharing among related entities, ontologies for IPR protection are proposed. This study contains three parts, which are developed to deal with different perspectives in this domain. The first part presents a static ontology, i.e. a hierarchy framework for the domain language, including primarily classes of participants, classes of IP works, classes of activities, and relations between these classes. In the second part, a dynamic ontology is shown to illustrate the IPR protection process. Thirdly, a causal map is used to demonstrate how classes of IPR protection methodologies are causally related with classes of IP piracy methodologies. Finally, the case of Tomato Garden is offered to demonstrate how the proposed ontologies are used in the real world. In respect of the ontology, it is first helpful to gain a comprehensive understanding of domain knowledge of IPR protection; second, IPR protection systems’ design and development in this domain are facilitated and supported by these ontologies; third, the proposed ontologies are united in the Ontology Web Language (OWL) and the OWL rules languages framework, both of which are machine readable.

Introduction

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), defines intellectual property (IP) as creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce. IP is divided into two categories: Industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and Copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs (WIPO, 2004).

IP allows people to own their creativity and innovation in the same way that they can own physical property. The owner of IP can control and be rewarded for its use, and this encourages further innovation and creativity to the benefit of everyone. Often, more than one of the above protection types may apply to the same creation.

Innovation in information technologies and network communications offers people a great opportunity for the widespread and efficient utilization of IP works through various channels. As well as enjoying the convenience of worldwide information sharing, however, the entire society is faced with the issue of violation of IPR. IPR violation overlaps with issues of commercial domain, legal domain and technical domain – piracy of software, audio, database, books, reverse engineering of marketed hardware as well as theft of sensitive commercial designs by competing corporate entities. The piracy of IP works is a major form of IP violation. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) estimated the annual loss of revenue in the US business software industry due to piracy at US$14273 million, and in the record and music industries at US$1486.9 million, for the financial year of 2009, as reported on 18 February 2010 (IIPA, 2010). It is also worth noting that a large portion of Internet bandwidth (approximately 30%) is consumed by users exchanging illegal copies of digital media (mainly video). It is certain that there will always be people with enough motivation to illegally use IP works by circumventing protection mechanisms (Vassiliadis & Fotopoulos, 2007).

It is the goal of our paper to propose ontologies that illustrate the domain knowledge about IPR protection. The paper is comprised of three parts. The first part, which is represented using the description logic variant of the Web Ontology Language (OWL DL), provides a static ontology, i.e. a hierarchy framework for the domain language, including primarily classes of participants, classes of IP works, classes of activities, and relations between these classes. It constitutes a specification of the domain-specific concepts of classes, entities, properties, and activities as a set of relationships that exist among these vocabulary terms. In the second part, a dynamic ontology is presented to illustrate the IPR protection process. Thirdly, a causal map is used to demonstrate how classes of IPR protection methodology are causally related with classes of IP pirate methodology, which can be written as rules using the OWL rules language (Horrocks, Patel-Schneider, Bechhofer, & Tsarkov, 2005). The ontology in the paper provides not only a formal description of objects in the domain knowledge and shared terminology, but also a formal basis for reasoning domain knowledge. Thus on the basis of the ontologies, it is first helpful to gain a comprehensive understanding of the domain knowledge of IPR protection; second, IPR protection systems’ design and development in this domain are facilitated and supported by this ontology. The proposed ontologies are then united in the OWL and the OWL rules languages framework, both of which are machine readable, part of which is shown in Appendix A.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 illustrates the related techniques, i.e. ontology, OWL DL, and OWL rules language; the details of static and dynamic ontologies are presented in Section 3. The causal map in the domain will be proposed in Section 4. In Section 5, the Tomato Garden case is analyzed using the proposed ontologies. Finally, conclusions are presented in Section 6.