Use of information from open sources and intellectual property rights
Authors: Shmatkov Daniil , Kolomiitsev Serhii 
Published: July 2024

Problems setting. Legal restrictions in working with open sources often concern intellectual property, and the possibility of establishing such restrictions is an important problem. The Berkeley Protocol states that investigators should be aware of any intellectual property permissions they may need to lawfully publish, distribute, and/or otherwise use the information they gather during the investigation. Analysis of recent researches and publications. The use of information from open sources is subject to both legal and technical restrictions, such as third-party rights and platform rights, the validity of the license granted to the platform providing access, the technical requirements of the platforms, the purpose of use of the works, etc. The application of many OSINT methods may encounter legal restrictions, so these restrictions require systematization, additional analysis and description in accordance with the state of technology development. Purpose of the research is to describe and systematize the main legal risks associated with intellectual property when using information from open sources. Article’s main body. To achieve the goal of the article, the following widespread methods of OSINT are considered: text and data mining, image analysis, video analysis, audio analysis, face recognition, geolocation, improvement and use of open-source software products. Conclusions and prospects for development. The following risks of OSINT activities are identified according to the probability of their occurrence: – high degree: violation of copyright of its owner due to the difficulty of identifying that owner and the difficulty of managing the distribution of information in the global network; use of works or products (even from authoritative or familiar resources for the user) that violate the intellectual property rights of third parties; violation of intellectual property rights in one country without violation of the same rights in another country due to the lack of international unified laws; violation of platform license terms due to differences in such licenses and careless reading; violation of the license terms of the open source product due to differences in such licenses or incorrect (compared to the license) interpretation of the term “open source” by the user; ignoring the collection of permissions from a large number of parties involved; – medium degree: violation of the copyright of its owner due to the use of pirated works; violation of commercial secret rights; – low degree: violation of trademarks rights of faces; violation of patent rights for products used for a particular investigation due to lack of knowledge of such rights. To reduce such risks, the most obvious are the following actions: unification of national laws; implementation of special legal regimes for the use of information from open sources at the national and/or international levels; unification of license agreements of large platforms on a voluntary basis; training researchers in intellectual property issues; intensifying the implementation of technological solutions of intellectual property rights management, such as blockchain, encryption of works and watermarks; and noncommercial use of intellectual property rights, without going beyond the scope corresponding to the intended purpose.