[Upd-discuss] Did You Say "Intellectual Property"? It's a Seductive Mirage by Richard M. Stallman

[Dean Anderson]

Speaking to a law professor on the subject of the term "intellectual
property", I recently noted that the IETF's attorney seemed to miss a
point that one might give copyright permission separately from patent
permission and trademark permission. The IETF was working on drafting
language for intellectual property rights on data and programs produced
for the IETF, and the language produced was specific to copyright. I got
the feeling that the attorney (a very competent fellow) thought the issue
sort of a nit until I pointed out that The Open Group owns the trademark
on Unix, while SCO owns the source code copyright, and Novell claimed to
still own the patents (Actually they may have dropped that claim, now).  
But, having the source code copyright doesn't mean you can actually run
the program, legally. You might not have a patent license.  And its not an
academic exercise. People really want to sell these things off separately.

I don't know if there is a way to prevent one from running a program based
on a trademark claim (maybe a TV ticker that displays a trademark in
operation, and runs on national TV or some such), but I'm not a lawyer,
and certainly not a clever lawyer.

The term "intellectual property" is as bad for lawyers as it is for the
rest of us. It leads them into thinking in terms of one object instead of
at least three.  It doesn't help with clear thinking. But, I think, that's
the beauty of it.

Of course, I'm the President of the League for Progamming Freedom, which
has as its purpose the abolition of Software Patents, having succeeded at
ridding ourselves of user interface copyrights, so I have a biased
viewpoint.

		--Dean

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Alan Story wrote:

>  
> I beg to differ with the main thrust of the article (below) by Richard
> Stallman. While I certainly agree that it is wrong to over-generalise about
> how to understand and classify phenomena such as copyright and patents, it
> is now becoming "fashionable" and downright "seductive" --- to use Richard's
> words ---- to fail to appreciate how similar such phenomena, in fact, are
> and the essential similarity of their effects on the peoples of the world. 


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