ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the legal protection for high-tech innovations under intellectual property laws, including copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. It observes that laws to protect intellectual property serve two primary purposes. The first is to grant legally recognizable rights to creators and other producers of the knowledge and information embodied in goods and services to control their use and distribution. The second purpose is to promote, as a matter of public policy, innovation and the dissemination and application of its results in order to stimulate technological change and the enhanced productivity that it produces. The chapter also observes that convergence of open source and patent regimes has not yet taken hold in the smartphone market to the extent it has in the software market. Finally, the chapter examines the significant public policy constraints on the use of intellectual property and proprietary information as part of a firm's marketing strategies-antitrust and privacy laws.
