Redefining Intellectual Property

Mike Masnick at Techdirt.com is is running an interesting article on his blog dissecting the term “intellectual property” arguing that the term creates an inaccurate mindset regarding the rights afforded to copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret holders. A few possible alternatives mentioned by Mike: “Intellectual Monopoly,” “Intellectual Privilege,” and “Imaginary Property.” I am in strong favor of IP reform, but I don’t think referring to IP as “property” causes the problems that Masnick claims. The IP rights that authors (and their assignees) have are fairly well fleshed out in the law, and no matter what you call IP, the content owners are going to try to assert whatever rights they have. Calling the record companies’ ownership of compositions and recordings an “imaginary monopoly” is not going to stop them from suing infringers (or their customers for that matter). As long as Disney is able to keep convincing congress to extend the duration of copyright protection, they could care less what you call it. I do see Masnick’s point, that we need to change the way the public thinks about IP rights, but I don’t actually think the public is the problem, it is the law makers that need to come around, and it is hard enough to get the message thorough to them without worrying about teaching them a new vocabulary.

Mike’s article as TechDirt is well written and and enjoyable read. Despite my disagreement with his position, I recommend you give it a read. Excerpt below:

If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?: “Continuing my ongoing series of posts on ‘intellectual property,’ I wanted to discuss the phrase itself. It’s become common language to call it intellectual property, but that leads to various problems — most notably the idea that it’s just like regular property. It’s not hard to come up with numerous reasons why that’s not true, but just the word ‘property’ seems to get people tied up. There are some who refuse to use the term, but it is handy shorthand for talking about the general space.

The main reason why I have trouble with the ‘property’ part isn’t just the fact that it leads people to try to pretend it’s just like tangible property, but because it automatically biases how people think about the concept. As I’ve written before, the very purpose of ‘property’ and ‘property rights’ was to better manage allocation of scarce resources. If there’s no scarce resource at all, then the whole concept of property no longer makes sense. If a resource is infinite, it no longer matters who owns it, because anyone can own it and it doesn’t diminish the ownership of anyone else. So, the entire rationale for ‘property rights’ disappears.

(Via Techdirt.)