Copyright Protection for Intellectual Property

Intellectual property takes several forms, the most important of which are patents, copyrights, and trade rights. Patents protect inventions. One can patent methods and processes, new varieties of plants, and (more weakly) designs. The VSI alliance proposed the usage of the three approaches for proper protection of IP designs. The detection approach directly interacts with the VLSI design, and is considered an overhead on the design cycle. IP watermarking and IP fingerprinting are the main approaches used, where the design is watermarked (tagged) then different tracking techniques are used to keep track of the usages of such design. Reuse-Based design methodology has taken hold, the very large scale integration (VLSI) design industry is confronted with the increasing threat of intellectual property (IP) infringement.