Intellectual property rights

“ 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. ”

“ These limitations on intellectual property do not fit a single theory, unless that theory is "avoiding the multiple and evolving dangers of intellectual property itself." Even a single limitation such as fair use clearly responds to many different concerns about the dangers of intellectual property rights. Indeed it will evolve to fit new circumstances. When computer programs were first clearly covered by copyright law, software engineers wondered if this would cripple the industry. ”

“ In respect of all categories of intellectual property covered in this Chapter, [3] each Party shall accord to nationals of another Party treatment no less favourable than it accords to its own nationals with regard to the protection [4] of intellectual property rights. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ One of the most stunning pieces of evidence to our aversion to openness is that, for the last fifty years, whenever there has been a change in the law, it has almost always been to expand intellectual property rights. (Remember, this implies that every significant change in technology, society, or economy required more rights, never less, nor even the same amount.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Parties also acknowledge the importance of informational materials, such as publicly accessible databases of registered intellectual property rights that assist in the identification of subject matter that has fallen into the public domain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ IPR and Interoperability During the past year, a number of countries, mostly in Western Europe, have devoted increasing attention to the relationship between intellectual property rights, digital rights management technologies, and interoperability of consumer products and other devices. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even if we heeded the precepts I have outlined in this book, even if we actually started to look at intellectual property as an empirical question, even if we turned to data rather than faith for our assessments, reasonable people would disagree about much. Some of the most ludicrous recent excesses—huge retrospective copyright term extensions, database rights, proposed webcasting treaties, business method patents—do not pass the laugh test, in my view and that of most scholars. ”

“ The reach of the rights has been expanded, and their content made more difficult to understand, at the exact moment that their practical effect has been transformed. It is not merely that the triggers of intellectual property law can easily be set off by individual footsteps. ”

“ Each Party shall, subject to its law, make available on the Internet information that it makes public concerning registered or granted trademarks, geographical indications, designs, patents and plant variety rights, sufficient to enable the public to become acquainted with those registered or granted rights. ”

“ The owner of a protected industrial design shall have the right to prevent third parties not having the owner's consent from making, selling or importing articles bearing or embodying a design which is a copy, or substantially a copy, of the protected design, when such acts are undertaken for commercial purposes. ”

“ The profiteers’ insatiable thirst for profit clearly benefits from their new friendship with creativity and the creative. Unlike physical objects, concepts and ideas can be shared, copied and reused without diminishment. No matter how many people use and interpret a particular concept, nobody else’s use of that concept is surrendered or reduced. But through the use of intellectual property law – in the form of patents, trademarks and particularly copyright – concepts and ideas can be transformed into commodities that are privately regulated and owned. ”

“ 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. ”