Intellectual property law

“ Patents are increasingly stretched to cover "ideas" that twenty years ago all scholars would have agreed were unpatentable. 31 Most troubling of all are the attempts to introduce intellectual property rights over mere compilations of facts. 32 If U.S. intellectual property law had an article of faith, it was that unoriginal compilations of facts would remain in the public domain, that this availability of the raw material of science and speech was as important to the next generation of innovation as the intellectual property rights themselves. ”

“ The law of Intellectual Property was the law of rights of distributors, who oppressed producers by the alienation of the production from those who made and used it. We reverse that process and eliminate the law of Intellectual Property by eliminating distributors.
We eliminate distributors, because the technology of human society at the beginning of the twenty first century makes distribution child's play. ”

“ Each Party shall provide that its judicial authorities, if appropriate, have the authority to order, at the conclusion of civil judicial proceedings concerning infringement of at least copyright or related rights, patents and trademarks, that the prevailing party be awarded payment by the losing party of court costs or fees and appropriate attorney’s fees, or any other expenses as provided for under the Party’s law. ”

“ It is not merely supposed to produce incentives for innovation by rewarding creators, though that is vital. Intellectual property is also supposed to create a feedback mechanism that dictates the contours of information and innovation production. It is not an overstatement to say that intellectual property rights are designed to shape our information marketplace. Copyright law is supposed to give us a self-regulating cultural policy in which the right to exclude others from one's original expression fuels a vibrant public sphere indirectly driven by popular demand. ”

“ A Party may, but shall not be obliged to, provide more extensive protection for, or enforcement of, intellectual property rights under its law than is required by this Chapter, provided that such protection or enforcement does not contravene the provisions of this Chapter. ”

“ The opinion that the repeal of the law would leave intellectual property altogether unprotected, may be refuted by the fact that the principle of intellectual property cannot possibly form the basis for a Patent-Law. ”

“ The public was not at the table, needless to say, and the assumption was that to the extent there was a public interest involved in intellectual property law, it was in making sure that the industries involved got their act together, so that the flow of new books and drugs and movies would continue. Members of the public, in other words, were generally thought of as passive consumers of finished products produced under a form of intraindustry regulation that rarely implicated any act that an ordinary person would want, or be able, to engage in. ”

“ Where the intellectual property right owner is involved in any one of such practices as preventing the licensee form challenging the validity of the intellectual property right in the licensing contract, conducting coercive package licensing or incorporating exclusive grantback conditions in the licensing contract, which impairs the fair competition order of foreign trade, the authority responsible for foreign trade under the State Council may take measures as necessary to eliminate such impairment. ”

“ Furthermore, some courts have found little room to impose antitrust liability for a unilateral refusal to deal when intellectual property rights such as patent or copyright protect the aftermarket goods. ”

“ The shape of our copyright and to a lesser extent our patent system comes from a world in which almost all large-scale distribution was an expensive, capital-intensive enterprise. The roles of gatekeeper and financier, producer and assembler, distributor and advertiser, tended naturally to coalesce into vertically integrated firms or symbiotic commercial partnerships. Those firms were presumed to be the proxy for the public interest when it came to intellectual property policy. ”

“ Since human beings were fallible, surely there were occasions when the length of a copyright or patent term had proved to be too long, or the scope of a right too large, and the rights had been narrowed appropriately by legislation. Why did I not cite any of these? The answer is simple. To the best of my knowledge, there are none. Legislatively, intellectual property rights have moved only in one direction—outward. (Court decisions present a more complex picture, as the previous chapter's discussion of software copyrights and business method patents shows.) ”

“ Intellectual property rights – despite their noble title – are less about the intellect and more about property. This is Big Money: the markets in intellectual property outweigh the total industrial production in the world. ”

“ Similar tensions traverse the scientific arena, as cooperation between researchers, technicians and people from business enterprises also generates concerns on intellectual property and authorship. The point is to understand the breadth and depth of the collaboration: who has the intellectual initiative and the intellectual property and, obviously, who can claim the property rights, particularly when products are on the market to be sold and bought. ”

“ Everyone is beginning to understand that in the world of the twenty-first century the rules of intellectual property are both vital and contentious. How good it would be then if our debate on intellectual property policy were as vigorous and as informed as the debates of the nineteenth century. ”

“ Appropriate measures, provided that they are consistent with the provisions of this Chapter, may be needed to prevent the abuse of intellectual property rights by right holders or the resort to practices which unreasonably restrain trade or adversely affect the international transfer of technology. ”

“ Objectives The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights should contribute to the promotion of technological innovation and to the transfer and dissemination of technology, to the mutual advantage of producers and users of technological knowledge and in a manner conducive to social and economic welfare, and to a balance of rights and obligations. ”

“ The demise of intellectual property has lately become abundantly clear. The old intellectual property industries are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their monopolies (patents, trademarks, copyright) and their cost advantages in manufacturing and marketing. ”

“ It marks a world in which the old regime of intellectual property, operating upstream as a form of industrial competition policy, has been replaced. Intellectual property is now in and on the desktop and is implicated in routine creative, communicative, and just plain consumptive acts that each of us performs every day. Suddenly, the triggers of copyright—reproduction, distribution—can be activated by individual footsteps. ”

“ First, intellectual property rights are profoundly different from physical property rights over land in ways that should definitively shape policy choices. Second, partly because of those differences, and because of the influence of free-trade Scottish Enlightenment thought on the American Revolution in particular, there was a powerful antimonopolist and free-trade sentiment behind the copyright and patent clause. ”

“ We should not assume that intellectual property and material property are the same in all regards. The goal of creating the limited monopoly called an intellectual property right is to provide the minimum necessary incentive to encourage the desired level of innovation. Anything extra is deadweight loss. When someone takes your car, they have the car and you do not. When, because of some new technology, someone is able to get access to the MP3 file of your new song, they have the file and so do you. ”

“ Despite substantial progress by the Administration in negotiating mutually acceptable solutions to our intellectual property problems in many countries around the world, the lack of adequate and effective intellectual property protection has remained particularly acute in some countries. ”

“ The Internet has shown conclusively and visibly that—at least in certain sectors—we can have a global flowering of creativity, innovation, and information sharing in which intellectual property rights function in a very different way than under the standard model of proprietary control. In some cases, intellectual property rights were simply irrelevant—much of the information sharing and indexing on the Web falls within this category. In some cases they were used to prevent exclusivity. Think of Creative Commons or the General Public License. ”

“ It is unlikely that any of the cases SCO relies upon would have agreed that a transfer of other intellectual property rights, such as copyrights and patents, occurred when only trademarks are identified under the heading of "Intellectual Property." In interpreting the plain language of the APA in this case, Schedule 1.1 (a) , itself, represents a limitation of the intellectual property the parties intended to transfer. ”

“ On the one hand, we wish to protect and reward the work and investment of those who create intellectual property. In so doing, however, we must prevent the creation of a monopoly that would inhibit the creative expressions of others. ”

“ Yes, copyright looks very different from patent, just as a whale looks very different from a mouse. But we do not condemn the scientist who notes that they are both "mammals"—a socially constructed category—so long as he has a reason for focusing on that commonality. Second, the language of intellectual property exists. It has political reality in the world. ”

“ Ten years ago, when I first offered the environmental analogy, I claimed that intellectual property policy was seen as a contract struck between industry groups—something technical, esoteric, and largely irrelevant to individual citizens, except in that they were purchasers of the products that flowed out of the system. ”

“ Ten years ago, civil society had little to offer in terms of groups that represented anything other than an industry position on intellectual property, still less ones that took seriously the preservation of the public domain or the idea that intellectual property policy was a matter of balance, rather than simple maximization of rights. ”

“ Property in an intellectual production is the creation of statute, and is subject to limitations depending not upon any natural rights of the producer, but upon the convenience or advantage of the community.
Of these several theories or conceptions, it is the fourth which represents in substance the survival of the discussions of two centuries, and which has formed the basis of the copyright legislation of both Europe and America. ”

“ It is so because from the foundation of the world until now there never was a nation and there never was a day when the idea of the continuity of private property was connected in the minds of men with intellectual productions. England has developed the idea of private property more fully than has any other nation; and England never ascribed the idea of the continuity of private property to any intellectual production, either for an invention or for a writing. To this day no man has a right in England to a patent on an invention, and never has had. ”

“ The creations which are recognized as property by the common law are literary, dramatic, musical, and other artistic creations; and these have also protection under the copyright statutes. The inventions and discoveries upon which this attribute of property is conferred only by statute, are the few comprised within the patent law. There are also many other cases in which courts interfere to prevent curtailment of plaintiff's enjoyment of incorporal productions; and in which the right to relief is often called a property right, but is such only in a special sense. ”