One example that gave me a good, very proud internal maternal laugh had to do with trademarks and copyrights.

Over the years an area I've work within often has addressed copyright, trademark and other intellectual property protection and compliance. It's a very interesting area, and definitely a good one to discuss with your legal counsel before you try to write, much less implement, a policy for it.

My youngest, Heath, loves superheroes. In fact, over the years he has drawn a lot of them that he made up, and ever since January he's been talking about a very creative, specific, new superhero he wants to write a book about; I'll call him "Superhero A" so I don't let his unique idea out. :)

He has also created "Supervillian A," "Sidekick A," and "Superhero B" (all aliases once more).

Last week Heath came running to my office, upset, "Mommy, Noah stole my ideas and he typed them with TM!"

Upon further investigation I found that Noah had just typed up his own superhero stories on his computer, and within them he named his supervillian with the same name as Heath's "Superhero A." Beside each name of his superheros and supervillians he had neatly and consistently put a trademark symbol ™. He then told Heath that now he couldn't legally use the name he had chosen for his superhero, whose character Heath had been creating in such a detailed fashion for over 6 months.

Wow! I was wonderfully surprised that Noah and Heath had both picked up the basic concepts of using a trademark!

I then spent some important time discussing with them how they should not steal each other's ideas, and how doing so was not only unethical, but also not allowed in our family!

Yes, now Noah and Heath are researching how to file real trademarks on their superheroes and supervillians names...another good summer project to add to their lists.

Noah and Heath also participate, with my oversight, in a couple of carefully chosen interactive virtual reality sites, such as Disney's Toontown. Recently Noah came to me with a concern, "Mommy, I think a website is trying to trick me."

He had found a site via an ask.com search for his other reality site, I'll call SiteB, that offered a long list of free site-related items, along with points and credits to add to their accounts in exchange for SiteB player account information. We investigated, and the suspicious site was not affiliated in any way that I could tell with SiteB.

"Can I see what happens?"

Me, "Not with your real ID and other information."

"Can I create a new account?"

Me, "Let's do a test."

So we went to SiteB and created a "throw-away" account, using all incorrect information for Noah and using one of my "throw-away" email addresses so I could give approval to get the account set up.

We then went to the suspicious site. We have a very good firewall on Noah's computer.

"I think they want to do bad things."

It asked for Noah's SiteB account ID, password ("Look Mommy, they aren't masking it!" as we typed it in), birth date ("Mommy, what can they do with that?" Hmm...long discussion here; and we did not enter the real date), PIN number (Hmm...no, no real info entered), and email address (another Hmm...used a completely made-up email address here) and submitted it.

A response came back saying, "Your information was received by me and will be used by me."

Noah did some further investigation and found the site that collected this information was created by a "free site" generator.

Hmm...

Noah then logged into SiteB using his throw-away account. No changes yet. By the afternoon of the next day he saw that the data in his account had been changed and that the parental restrictions we had established had all been removed. It also showed the account had been used a lot earlier in the day. The next day he was locked out of the account; his password had been changed.

We also found a SiteB discussion board and counted well over 800 postings by upset, distraught, and desperate SiteB players begging for their IDs, passwords, site credits (which most paid *REAL* money for) and points back. Apparently many SiteB members had fallen for the scam.

We then notified the SiteB admin with all this information.

I'm so glad I have security and privacy aware sons who are becoming more aware and seeking more knowledge every day!

More kids need to be more aware.

Noah and Heath have each asked me upon many occasions, "Can I work in your business when I grow up?" I'd love it! I'll see what they think in another 10 years. :)

At this moment Noah is still doing research, doing searches on how people scam other people on virtual reality sites...he's found a ton of blogs that describe in detail how to do this...he says he's going to warn his friends.