Intellectual property
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JC sounds off™ on Intellectual Property©
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Intellectual property will be the outrage of our time.
Not to be confused with confidential information, “intellectual property” is a broad term which covers copyrights, patents, trade marks and legal rights to use and control others’ use of information — so-called “property rights”, though they are nothing of the kind — that arise at common law (or under statute ) which can be enforced against all comers, and not simply as a result of any contract.
Whereas an item of physical property — be it land or chattels — is naturally scarce, limited to being in one place in spacetime, and the human creative input into the object’s value is limited, bound into its first sale, and thereafter more or less extinguished (or assigned wholly, to the extent of that object, with the sale.[1] Intellectual property is not. Intellectual property has no physical dimension, is infinitely, costlessly replicable, and can exist in many space time continuum at once, and, generally, is not the fruit of some single man’s labour. Applying those tight, limited, dominating rights to a free spirit is to grant an unjustified, and quite unjustifiable, monopoly. If you want to control your “intellectual property”, do so by licence and by code.
In specialist circles, when negotiating IP-heavy arrangements like ITC contracts, there is foreground IP and background IP. These we deal with in greater depth in the premium content section.
For intellectual property rights to arise there needs, as the name suggests, to be some application of someone’s intellect to the creation of the information. Not all information can be protected: raw data, for example, can’t.
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See also
References
- ↑ Though this makes me feel dirty even saying it, because that is to apply a ludicrous intellectual property lens to a matter is should have no right to be part of.