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The categorisation is important. Copyright is very different from trademarks is very different from patents. It is important to understand these different laws

The 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 ago
Trademarks: 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 ago

Trademarks: 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.