Data protection and intellectual property

Sensitive data, such as biometric data (fingerprints, face scans), health records, financial information, personal documents and images, can cause real harm if it falls into the wrong hands. It is protected by encryption (scrambling it so only the right people can read it), authentication (checking a user's identity, as with passwords), and each country's data protection laws.

Intellectual property is anything created by the mind: inventions, books, songs, films, paintings, designs, names and logos. It belongs to its creator. The law protects it in three main ways:

• Copyright protects creative works (books, music, films, art, software code). It is granted automatically, as soon as the work is created.
• A patent protects an invention. It must be applied for, and lasts 20 years.
• A trademark protects a brand's name, logo or slogan.

Ways of violating intellectual property:

• Plagiarism: presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own, without citing (naming) the source. Copying text from the Internet into a project without mentioning where it came from is plagiarism.
• Copyright infringement: using someone's work without permission or payment, such as putting another person's music in your own video.
• Trademark infringement: using someone's trademark without permission.

Public licences let creators allow others to use and build on their work. Creative Commons (CC) licences are used for creative works; the GNU GPL is used for software, giving freedom to run, study, share and modify it. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Python, LibreOffice and Firefox, shares its source code.

Software piracy, copying or distributing software without authorisation, is copyright infringement, and it harms the people who make software.