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IP Theft Costing UK Businesses Billions

by Robin Pilgrim, LawAndTax-News.com, London

24 February 2004

A survey recently conducted by computer forensics firm, Ibas has revealed that the theft of intellectual property (IP) by departing employees is costing UK businesses billions of pounds.

According to the survey results, 69.6% of business professionals have stolen some form of corporate IP from their employer when leaving a job, with the most commonly stolen forms of IP including email address books (taken by 54.3% of leavers); sales proposals / presentations (32.6%) and customer databases / contact information (30.4%);

Ibas also revealed that the most commonly used method for stealing IP is to send electronic copies of documents and files to a personal email account.

Some 58.7% of those polled believed that taking IP is as, if not more, acceptable as exaggerating an insurance claim to cover the excess charge, and the most common justification given for IP theft was that the person had created the documents or files, and felt that they partly belonged to them.

Speaking with regard to the results, Simon James, the firm's UK managing director observed that:

"UK businesses are losing billions [of pounds] worth of intellectual property every year. Unless urgent action is taken, the problem will only get worse as information technology is making it easier and easier to steal IP. 30 years ago it would have been virtually impossible to steal a filing cabinet's worth of documents. Today, however, employees can quickly and easily copy the same amount of information onto a disk and slip it into their pocket on the way out of the door."

He concluded:

"Businesses need to toughen up their internal policies and make sure every employee is aware of the action that will be taken if they are caught stealing IP. Companies must have an incident management plan in place and bring in computer forensics experts to properly investigate suspected cases of IP theft to ensure that guilt can be proven beyond any reasonable doubt."

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