Just how bad is IP theft?

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Pretty bad according to a research report just released from McAfee,
Inc. According to the report:

Companies surveyed estimated that they lost an average of $4.6 million worth of intellectual property in 2008. Forty-two percent said laid-off employees were the single biggest threat to their intellectual property and other sensitive data they faced in the current economic climate.

The report also states four key findings:

  1. Increasing amounts of IP and sensitive customer data are being sent around the world and a percentage is being lost.
  2. The worsening economy is creating a “perfect information security risk storm” because laid off employees stealing IP now constitutes the largest risk.
  3. The countries of China, Pakistan, and Russia are particularly bad risks of IP loss.
  4. Cyberthieves have grown more sophisticated. Now rather than steal credit card numbers, why not steal the IP for creating the
    credit card processing programs?

To download the report, go to McAfee Unsecured Economy Report.

CodeCross tool just released for detecting software IP theft and infringement

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SAFE has just released a new tool for comparing computer code to detect copyright infringement and trade secret theft. CodeCross™ finds traces of nonfunctional source code that have been copied from one program to another.

According to Nikolaus Baer at Zeidman Consulting, a SAFE Corporation customer, “I suggested the concept of CodeCross after working on cases where stolen code had nonfunctional remnants in another party’s code. SAFE developed the tool quickly and it works great. In one case I found traces of copied code that had previously gone undetected.”

CodeCross is available with CodeSuite 3.2.0 and can be downloaded for free from the SAFE Corporation website.

This is my blog on software intellectual property

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Welcome to my blog. I’m the founder and president of SAFE Corporation. I’ll be regularly updating this blog with useful and interesting information about software intellectual property and software analysis. I’ll be posting facts and current events relating to IP litigation, software plagiarism detection (also known as copyright infringement), trade secret theft, and patent infringement. At SAFE Corporation we’re developing unique ground-breaking tools for analyzing, measuring, and comparing software — of course I’ll be updating you on all the cool new tools.

So stay tuned and feel free to comment.