These days it is equally important to safeguard digital properties: (a) What are digital properties? (b) Why is above given statement/fact important?

Q. These days it is equally important to safeguard digital properties:

(a) What are digital properties?

(b) Why is above given statement/fact important?

(c) What are possible threats to digital properties?

(d) How can digital properties be safeguarded?

Answer =

(a) Digital property (or digital assets) refers to any information about you or created by you that exists in digital form, either online or on an electronic storage device.

(b) Digital property rights lie with the owner. Legally a person who has created it or the owner who has got it developed by paying legally is the legal owner of a digital property. Only the owner can use and decide who all and in what form can his/her digital asset may be used by other, whether by making payments or by buying it or by obtaining its license or usage rights etc. But this is not the case generally; there are many threats to digital properties.

(c) Some common threats to digital properties:-

1. Digital software penetration tools: - Although one needs to buy usage rights or license to use a digital property, there are many software penetration tools such as cracks and keygens, tools created by hackers to penetrate your software's registration system and enable unauthorized users to freely access your software without actually paying for it.

2. Stealing and plagiarizing codes of your digital properties: - Sometimes other developers somehow get hold of your software's source code and then create plagiarized versions of your code and use it in their own software. In other words, they steal your software's source code and use it to build their own versions of it, and then sell it under their own company name.

(d) There are many ways you can ensure protection of your digital properties.

These are some protective measures:

1. Anti-Temper Solutions: - There are many anti-tamper solution available today which ensure that your digital property is tamper-proof. These anti-temper solutions use a host of advanced technologies to prevent hackers from hacking, reverse-engineering or manipulating your digital properties such as utility tools, software, apps, video games and so forth.

2. Legal Clauses: - Add legal clause in the clauses of use of your software/digital properties. You must include a transparent clause in your software's Terms of Service that prohibits the scraping of your software's source code for reuse. This is a sound legal backup for you.

3. Limit the sharing of software code: - You should share your software code only with trusted individuals who are part of development team. You should also use a Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution to protect your software from being scraped for source code using decompilers etc.