Intellectual Capital - A Third Party's Point of View

The four main participants concerning Intellectual Property are the owner, the receiver, the users, and the guards watching the ethicality. Generally, the disagreements between the IC owners and their receivers are resolved in the courts, where the ownership claims are investigated; the guard's role is to decrease the illegal transferring of the IC from the owners to illegal receivers (stealing the Intellectual Property). Such illegal IC acquisition causes damage to the IC's legal owners. However, this is not the case in IC transfer, in which the IC owners collaborate with the IC receivers and the guards make efforts to avoid such a transfer. Here the owners are not adversely affected and do not claim their ownership; on the contrary, they try to hide their ownership - the victims are third-party persons. An example of such illegal, collaborative IC transfer may serve students' interests in the context of an examination and their work submitted to the teacher for evaluation. The two stages of dealing with the above problems are as follows: 1. Avoiding the flow of information from outside the students' community and transferring it to the students themselves. Such avoidance may partially succeed, using some technical blocking methods; however, during classwork, the situation is more difficult, for example, dealing with homework. 2. Detection is the stage whereby the first line of security is inadequate, or it refers to increasing the protection level of the students' evaluation process. This stage requires more sophisticated methods for comparing two works and for estimating the probability that one work has been copied. The treatment of this issue depends on the types of work in various faculties. They may be divided into three main groups: 1. Humanities and Social Sciences - whose works are more verbal; 2. Natural Sciences and Engineering - in which the submitted works require some kind of formalization, including mathematical formulas and computing results. 3. Art - sculptures, paintings, and music - the results of the composers should be compared.