4 ms·
Rather than have an argument about categorization I'll instead respond to the core moral question. I do not think it is moral to claim that you own a story or
by kauffj 8y ago
Rather than have an argument about categorization I'll instead respond to the core moral question.
I do not think it is moral to claim that you own a story or a logo in the same way that one owns a shirt or a cell phone.
(But yes, I think a story or a logo is much more like a fact than property. Though they're certainly less fact-like than other types of facts.)
_Claiming_ to be another company that you are not is something different entirely (fraud) and does not require IP.
- jordigh 8y agoThe categorisation is important. Copyright is very different from trademarks is very different from patents. It is important to understand these different laws rather than saying that they're all about owning facts or owning whatever it is you consider "owning" to be. The very term "intellectual property" is troublesome because it indicates the very ownership that you're objecting to. There is no ownership. And there is no property. A patent is about disclosing inventions. Copyright is about giving the author economic and moral rights. A trademark is about making sure consumers are not deceived. It is a separate law than fraud. You can deceive by abusing trademarks without outright lying. Patents can be infringed accidentally. You can infringe a patent without ever being aware of it. You cannot accidentally infringe copyright. The plaintiff of a copyright infringement complaint has to prove that you deliberately copied. Independent retelling of a story is fine. Independent rediscovery of a patented invention is not. It is important to understand these laws, their origin, their purpose, and their nuance, whether you agree with them or not, in terms of the rights they grant and what constitutes infringement. Making the analogy to property and ownership is misleading and leads to the wrong conclusions about how these laws work. Know thy enemy.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoTrademarks: Who Copyrights: What Patents: How Many do not realize that utility patents generally protect how something is done, not what was done. Inventors will often say, we can't patent that because someone else does that thing already. But it is the "how" that matters not the "what." For example, even though the paper mention Amazon's one-click patent, there are probably 100's of other shopping cart patents that claim different methods of making an ecommerce shopping cart work.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoUS Trademarks protect against consumer confusion. The policy is based on protecting the public not the trademark holder. Trademarks are also defend-it-or-lose-it. That is why companies aggressively sue to protect their trademarks. If they do not actively defend their marks from infringement they will lose their rights in the undefended marks.