Template:Derived information
Derived information
Derived information, the fecund fruits of the receiver’s own creative juice and analytical energy, worked upon information given to the receiver by the discloser, is in no sense “proprietary” to the disclosing party[1], and may indeed be as commercially sensitive[2] to the receiving party as the material the disclosing party gave, and on which it was based, it in the first place: think of Paul’s middle eight about having a shave and catching the bus in A Day in the Life. We are in danger of getting into the jurisprudential wisdom of treating intellectual endeavour as if it were tangible property — but let’s not go there just now.[3]
Ok, let’s go there. If the information in question not, in the first place, mine — that is to say, it isn’t intellectual property in the first place, then the question arises why I should be able to stop you deriving your own intellectual property out of it. This boils down to whether it was secret or can be somehow configured as proprietary. If you would not have had the data any other way, then I am giving up something by letting you have it. It might not be proprietary, but it is secret.
- ↑ If the disclosed information ever was proprietary in the first place, that is — if it doesn’t qualify as intellectual property it isn’t, or course.
- ↑ And more deserving of protection: applying some analytics to raw trading data may convert it from un-ownable data to creatively juicy intellectual property, of course.
- ↑ Those who can’t resist the siren call, start with Lawrence Lessig’s fabulous Code: Version 2.0.