Intellectual property

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The older strategy of intellectual property law was a "braided" one: thread a thin layer of intellectual property rights around a commons of material from which future creators would draw. 35 Even that thin layer of intellectual property rights was limited so as to allow access to the material when that was necessary to further the goals of the system. Fair use allows for parody, commentary, and criticism, and also for "decompilation" of computer programs so that Microsoft's competitors can reverse engineer Word's features in order to make sure their program can convert Word files. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many academics who study both science's organizational structure and the intellectual property claims that surround it are concerned about the results. To say this is not to conjure up a tragically lost world of pure research science, untainted by property claims or profit motives. That world never existed and it is probably a good thing too. Intellectual property rights, and the profit motive more generally, have a vital and beneficial role in moving innovations from lab bench to bedside, from computer simulation to actual flight. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ The Parties recognise the relevance of intellectual property systems and traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources to each other, when that traditional knowledge is related to those intellectual property systems. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution were the embryonic precursors of intellectual property introduced but they were still limited to industrial designs and processes, mainly as embedded in machinery. The patent was born. The more massified the market, the more sophisticated the sales and marketing techniques, the bigger the financial stakes – the larger loomed the issue of intellectual property. ”

“ When the subject is intellectual property, this gap in our knowledge turns out to be important because our intellectual property system depends on a balance between what is property and what is not. For a set of reasons that I will explain later, "the opposite of property" is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. ”

“ Some of the challenges are subtle: in patent law, stretched interpretations of novelty and nonobviousness allow intellectual property rights to move closer and closer to the underlying data layer; gene sequence patents come very close to being rights over a particular discovered arrangement of data—C's, G's, A's, and T's. ”

“ Potential gain did not offset the need to compensate for potential loss. 4
So what views of intellectual property were we carrying forward into the Internet age? Intellectual property is just like other property. Rights are presumptively absolute. Any limitations on them, such as fair use, are taxes on property owners, subsidies to the society at large. It sounds like a perfect time to administer the Jefferson Warning I sketched out in Chapter 2. ”

“ Systems of legislation, at first of very limited term and of restricted scope, have led up to the comprehensive codes giving wide and definite protection for all classes of intellectual property for a term of years extending beyond life, with the least possible formalities compatible with the necessities of legal procedure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I want to convince you that intellectual property is important, that it is something that any informed citizen needs to know a little about, in the same way that any informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment, or civil rights, or the way the economy works. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How should we fit software into the categories of intellectual property? We have "writing," fixation in some medium of symbols that can be read by others—both machine and human. Writing is normally the domain of copyright. Are computer programs copyrightable? All kinds of problems present themselves. At least in the United States, copyright covers expression. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ And some of them, like the design of our telecommunications networks, or the patenting of human genes, or the relationship between copyright and free speech, are not merely interesting, they are important. It seems like a bad idea to leave them to a few lawyers and lobbyists simply because you are told they are "technical." 11
So the first goal of the book is to introduce you to intellectual property, to explain why it matters, why it is the legal form of the information age. The second goal is to persuade you that our intellectual property policy is going the wrong way ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance of principles, rather than as the power play it is too often ends up being ('big money vs. rogue pirates') , we may be able to come up with some reasonable accommodations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ New electronic media—in particular the Internet and World Wide Web—have opened up very animated discussions on authorship and intellectual property, and even fiercer debates as far as copyright and legal issues are concerned. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The wording has been updated but, in accordance with Article 52 (3) , the meaning and scope of the right are the same as those of the right guaranteed by the ECHR and the limitations may not exceed those provided for there.
Protection of intellectual property, one aspect of the right of property, is explicitly mentioned in paragraph 2 because of its growing importance and Community secondary legislation. Intellectual property covers not only literary and artistic property but also inter alia patent and trademark rights and associated rights. ”