SecurityArena

Types of Laws

Civil law It is also called as Tort law. It deals with wrongs against individuals or companies that result in damages or loss. A civil lawsuit would result in financial restitution instead of jail sentences.

Tort Law

Tort law is a body of law that addresses, and provides remedies for, civil wrongs not arising out of contractual obligations. A person who suffers legal damages may be able to use tort law to receive compensation from someone who is legally responsible, or "liable," for those injuries. Generally speaking, tort law defines what constitutes a legal injury and establishes the circumstances under which one person may be held liable for another's injury. Torts cover intentional acts and accidents.

• For instance, Alice throws a ball and accidentally hits Brenda in the eye. Brenda may sue Alice for losses occasioned by the accident (e.g., costs of medical treatment, lost income during time off work, and pain and suffering). Whether or not Brenda wins her suit depends on if she can prove Alice engaged in tortuous conduct. Here, Brenda would attempt to prove Alice had a duty and failed to exercise the standard of care which a reasonable person would render in throwing the ball.
• If it was an accident, Brenda must prove negligence. To do this, Brenda must show that her injury was reasonably foreseeable, that Alice owed Brenda a duty of care not to hit her with the ball, and that Alice failed to meet the standard of care required.

Criminal law

It is used when an individual’s conduct violates the government’s laws, which have been developed to protect the public. Jail sentences are commonly the punishment.

Administrative law

It deals with regulatory standards that regulate performance and conduct. Government agencies create these standards, which are usually applied to companies and individuals, within those companies.

Intellectual Property Laws

Intellectual property laws deal with legal property rights over creations of the mind, both artistic and commercial, and the corresponding fields of law. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; ideas, discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs.

• Trade secret. A trade secret is something that is proprietary to a company and important for its survival and profitability. An example of a trade secret is the formula used for a soft drink, such as Coke or Pepsi. The resource that is claimed to be a trade secret must be confidential and protected with certain security precautions and actions. A trade secret could also be a new form of mathematics, source code of a program, a method of making the perfect jelly bean, or ingredients for a special, secret sauce.

Employees must be informed of the level of secrecy or confidentiality of the resource, and of their expected behavior pertaining to that resource.

A company must practice due care and properly protect the resource that it has claimed to be so important to the survival and competitiveness of the company, for law to take effect against any breach against trade secret.

• Copyright. Copyright gives the creator of an original work exclusive right for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain.

      Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete and fixed in a medium.

• Trademark. It is used to protect a word, name, symbol, sound, shape, color, device or combination of these.
• Patent. A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to an inventor or his assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention.
• Software Piracy If a company is found guilty of illegally copying software or using more copies than its license permits, the network administrator or security officer in charge of this task will be primarily responsible.
  • The Software Protection Association (SPA) has been formed by major companies to enforce proprietary rights of software. The association was formed to protect the founding companies’ software developments, but it also helps others to ensure that their software is properly licensed.
  • Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), headquartered in London.
  • Business Software Alliance (BSA), based in Washington, D.C.
  • Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to create products that circumvent copyright protection mechanisms.
• Equipment Disposal. Depending on the vendor of the system, it may be illegal to sell a computer with an operating system without proper licensing, or it may be illegal to sell the system without an operating system at all, at time of equipment or software disposal.