The subject came up in another thread. But that thread had a specific topic and I don’t want to derail it with a general discussion. Hence, this thread.
I’ll define intellectual property as having a right to own an idea and have exclusive control over its use. It can be an idea for an invention, a work of fiction, a performance, etc. The basic idea is intellectual property is not physical objects. As ideas, they can generally be reproduced at will so in theory an intellectual property can be duplicated as needed without diminishing the supply.
So what should be the ideal we are striving for in intellectual property rights?
I feel our system is a balance intentionally created to serve two conflicting principles.
On the one hand, we feel that allowing creators to have exclusive ownership of intellectual property and control the distribution of their ideas rewards creators for coming up with good ideas by giving them a financial incentive. Society as a whole benefits by the creation of the new ideas that result.
On the other hand, we feel that society benefits when good ideas are used. To achieve this benefit, the ideal would be allowing the free use of ideas. The more people using a good idea, the bigger the benefit from that idea.
The two principles are clearly in conflict. You can’t have a system that maximizes exclusive control of ideas and the free use of ideas. So our general rule has been to allow for a limited period of exclusive control followed by an unlimited period of free use. The exclusive control period encourages people to create new ideas and the free use period encourages people to use those new ideas.
I feel that our system of intellectual property has become distorted because a third party has been introduced between the idea creators and the idea users. I’ll call these people the idea distributers.
Distributers do not create the original ideas. They generally pay creators to come up with ideas and buy the ideas that independent creators came up with. They then make money by controlling the use of these ideas.
I feel that distributers aren’t generally helping society. The money that goes to distributers is not going to creators. (In many cases, the distributers are receiving a far larger share of the money than the creator ever receives.) So by diverting this money away from creators, they are diminishing the incentive I mentioned above for creators to come up with ideas. So distributers reduce the amount of new ideas.
Distributers also diminish the other goal I mentioned; that of the use of ideas. Distributers obviously don’t support the free use of the ideas they own. They want to retain exclusive control of the intellectual property the own for as long a period as possible and delay the eventual release of that property into free use as far into the future as they can push it. There are countless examples of intellectual property that is still owned by a distributer long after its original creator has died.
So I feel our system of intellectual property ownership would improve if we could reduce the role of distributers in it.
I think this is mostly wrong. If you look at the world of commercially-relevant copyrightable/patentable stuff, what you’re calling distributors are really content-creation firms.
I write software for a living. I have written a little bit of not-particularly commercially-relevant software in my life. The vast majority of what I’ve written was for my employer, a business to which I assign ownership of what I write. If that system didn’t exist, I expect that my commercially-useful software output would be a lot less than it is. My employer coordinates the work of lots of people, all of whom are contributing small parts of a larger product. Without that coordination and the financial incentives that come with it, largely, that sort of work wouldn’t get done as much.
It is of course possible to organize the creation of large commercially-relevant software projects where each individual author is independent and owns their direct creation. But it’s pretty inefficient. And it would likely mean I’d have to spend a lot more personal time or money in overhead around how those contracts would work.
And some works just couldn’t happen at all. I can’t imagine how you could possibly make a modern big budget film, for example, without assigning copyrights to a corporation.
I don’t think this is exclusive to what you’re calling distributors at all. There are a few individuals who hold copyrights on large commercially-relevant bodies of work, and they tend to act the same way. When you have a legal monopoly on a resource worth a lot of money, you are highly motivated to keep that control of it, whether you’re a single person or a corporation. The difference is that due to the complexities of most content generation, most large copyright portfolios are held by companies rather than individuals.
The primary problem with copyright isn’t who holds it; it’s that it lasts too long. Patents are a lot more sane, lasting a few decades, which is plenty of time to make it worth developing new things. There’s no reason that someone who wrote a song 50 years ago or a book 70 years ago or a piece of software 30 years ago needs to continue to make money off that creation for effectual perpetuity.
I disagree. Because I feel that what I wrote about distributers is mostly right.
I acknowledge that there are exceptions. And you may be right that software development is one of the exceptions. I don’t know the business as well as you do and I don’t know if an alternative system of independent software designers would work.
But as a general rule, I feel in any creative field the creators should not be outnumbered by the support staff. In popular music, for one example, you might have a dozen people doing administrative work for every creator performing music. And I feel the record company is the one is the one that primarily benefits from such an imbalance. That musician is the one ultimately producing all the income but he’s only getting a small share of it.
When a CD is sold for around twenty dollars (admittedly an archaic format) the record company typically collects around nineteen dollars and the performer gets around one dollar. Suppose we could develop a system where consumers could cut out the record company and pay the performer directly. Suppose a consumer could buy that CD for five dollars and the artist received four of those dollars. Consumers and artists would both benefit from this system.
Now I already said that selling music on CD’s is archaic. Most music today is sold on some electronic format. Which means the system I described is probably possible. But record companies are charging people for electronic content with a markup as if they were selling physical products.
It’s not just music. Go to Amazon right now and look at J.K. Rowling’s new book. A physical book is priced at $13.49. A Kindle edition of the same book is priced at $17.99. This despite that fact that the Kindle edition cost virtually nothing to produce or distribute.
You go wrong right at the start. Most types of intellectual property don’t give you ownership and exclusive control over hte use of an idea. The man type of intellectual property that gives you interest in an idea is patent protection. Trade secrets are sometimes—but not always—about ideas.
Copyright law doesn’t give interest in an idea. Trademark law doesn’t give interest in an idea. Personality rights don’t give interest in an idea.
No, they might in some respects in conflict, but they aren’t “clearly” in conflict. In many ways, giving someone exclusive rights actually facilitates spreading of the work.
Only a patent owner might get to practice a patent for a term, but everyone gets to see everythign that the patent owner knows and discovered and invented, and can use that knowledge for further development.
Giving ownership of a creative work to someone in many cases incentivizes distribution of that work, so that it can be enjoyed and learned from. And ideas in creative works are free to use. Only the expression is excluded.
I don’t want to get derailed into an argument over legal semantics. I defined what I consider intellectual property for the purposes of this thread in the OP. And I explained why these different legal terms share similar aspects and can be covered under the umbrella term like “ideas”.
You are free to “use” the knowledge “for further development”, as Acsenray wrote, but you can’t produce anything that incorporates it without licensing the patented technology or waiting for the patent to expire. If you patent your further development, the “original” patent owner has the same restrictions and opportunities.
Personally I think intellectual property rights cover such a diverse range of expressions that it’s senseless to discuss them all at once. Music, art, literature, non-fiction, video, software all have different challenges and different technological trajectories and histories, and the related rights require more diversity than the law currently includes.
I may regret jumping into this but in my experience intellectual property rights have mostly dealt with methods and software that a company uses to produce an aspect of their product. I worked for a well known audio supplier and they developed their own proprietary software for tuning vehicles, rooms and event venues to allow for audio digital signal processing to maximize performance. They developed advance algorithms for noise cancelation and digital signal processing techniques that set them apart from the completion. They did not file for patents or publish papers like many companies do because they did not want “give away” the “secret sauce” so to speak.
Come to think of it, secret sauces are also intellectual property. Tabasco, Coca-Cola and KFC’s 11 herbs and spices are all intellectual property. To patent these would defeat the purpose.
Yes, what the intent is behind the fixed-term duration of the patent, and of copyright before it was metastasized into absurdity. The person or their asignees gets exclusive rights to exploit the fruits of their creation for X reasonable time, and then it goes to the public domain.
Meanwhile there is another type of Intelllectual Property, for example trademarks and “trade secrets” such as Si_Amigo pointed out, which are ongoing competitive factors that the holder is not obliged to share.
However, seeing as Intellectual Property IS a well established and developed area of the Law, you realize that a large part of the readership will approach it from that side rather than from your personal philosophical angle.
Right, you have to wait. This was an issue in early aviation days between the Wrights and Glenn Curtiss to the point the US Government had to intervene to have WW1 aircraft production proceed as needed.
Secret sauces are trade secrets, not intellectual property. If I learned of KFC’s 11 herbs I could make fried chicken with them all day long, and sell it, publish a book with the recipe and call it “My great chicken!” and there is nothing KFC could do about it. What I couldn’t do is promote it as “exactly like KFC!” (I think) and somewhere along the line from KFC to me someone probably violated their employee and or NDA agreement with KFC. But there is no legal protection for the purely factual elements of a recipe other than swearing everyone to secrecy.
I’d say that’s a pretty narrow definition of being able to use a product.
If I invented and patented a device which tripled a car’s mileage and then sold the rights to General Motoes, they would be able to install my device in the cars they produce. Other companies like Ford and Toyota might be able to study my device for further knowledge but they wouldn’t be able to install it in the cars they’re selling - which would be the normal use of my device they would want.
Again I don’t want to get derailed into an argument of correct terminology. Just accept the premise. For the purpose of this thread, intellectual property is anything based on ownership of an idea rather than a physical object. So it includes things like patents, copyrights, and trade secrets.
Fine. Based on that premise I think our current many-varied system of intellectual property protection is pretty good compared to any future system that doesn’t take into consideration the important differences between patents, copyright and trade secrets and which doesn’t evaluate what should go under each category and their subcategories.
Except there is no right to trade secrets. That’s the point. Coca Cola doesn’t want to patent their formula; neither does KFC. If they choose to keep something secret for their own business advantage, they don’t have any intellectual property right in it. If their secret formulas escape into the wild, they can’t prevent anyone else from using them, because they chose not to patent them.
And copyright isn’t ownership of an idea; it’s a right to a particular expression of an idea. A school textbook on chemistry is copyright, so no-one can use that particular expression of an idea, the text and the illustrations, without paying royalties. But the ideas contained in the chemistry textbook can be used by anyone, to write their own book explaining the periodic table and how it relates to chemistry, for example.
If you insist on your own definition of intellectual property that doesn’t match real life, there’s not much point in a debate.
I’m not insisting on my own definition. I acknowledge that what I am using are not precise legal terms. But we are not writing a contract here or presenting a case in a court of law.
I am trying to have a discussion about the issue. And for that purpose, it’s useful to have some convenient terms we can use.
The patent owner holds right shoulder only over the exact claims of them patent (with some exceptions). The knowledge contained within the patent is free to use so long as you aren’t duplicating all the steps of the patent claims.