Intellectual Property - Cybersecurity

Intellectual property (IP) is a body of work created and owned by an entity or individual that carries rights of ownership (for example, copyrights or patents). IP can include inventions, art, music, software, or designs. The relevance of IP to cybersecurity is that theft of IP is often the objective of malicious cyber intrusions.

Threat actors target IP for the purposes of selling it for profit as well as using it to advance the purposes of another entity (for example, a nation-state). Software piracy, the theft of software, is prevalent. Digital copyright protections, although not infallible, particularly against the well-resourced actor, aim to address software piracy.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was enacted in 1998 in response to growing issues of copyright and theft of digital media, and to address the growing digital market. The DMCA was required to implement US treaty obligations managed by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Specifically, it put in place legal restrictions on bypassing technological protections used by copyright owners to protect their work, including against removing or changing copyright management information.