[Upd-discuss] The Myth of Intellectual Property

07 Nov 2005 10:24:00 -0500

Trademarks were NEVER intended to be property. There is no jurisprudence to support that notion. In fact trademarks were originally nothing more than a right to a tort action and remain at least in theory something short of a property right (unlike property as one small example, trademarks cannot be bought and sold except as an extension of an ongoing business; as a further example they are conclusively lost when not used--hardly the indicia of property rights).

Mickey Davis 
_________________________________

Prof. Michael H. Davis
Professor of Law
Cleveland State Univ. College of Law
1801 Euclid Ave.
Cleveland, OH 44115-2214 (mailing address: 2121 Euclid Ave. LB 234)
216-687-2228
_________________________________
Patent Attorney Admitted to Practice Before the US Patent and Trademark Office Reg.No. 45,863

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Hart <hart@pglaf.org>
Date: Monday, Nov 7, 2005 10:13 am
Subject: [Upd-discuss] The Myth of Intellectual Property

THE MYTH OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The first myth of intellectual property is in the name itself,
because copyrights and patents were never meant to be property,
but only limited durations licenses.  Trademarks were the only
concept meant to be actual property.

Because we let them get away with this misuse of of this word,
they now feel they can expand that misconception of "property"
to the point where copyrights never expire, and have, in fact,
convinced The Supreme Court of the United States that Congress
has the power to continually extend copyrights as long as they
would like, to the point where copyrights are already a longer
period than any of us can expect to live after reading, seeing
or listening to any newly copyrighted material and can only be
presumed to become still longer under this ruling.

Copyright was designed as a limited duration license, and this
"limited period" is written right into the US Consititution.

However, the powers-that-be distorted this "limited period" of
14 years with a possible 14 year extension under certain terms
to now be a 95 year term without any extension required.

In an age when information is doubling every few years instead
of every few decades the copyright term could have been halved
every few decades to keep similar percentage of information in
copyright as compared to the public domain, which is/was to be
the other side of the copyright contract.

"You leave us the rights to this for xx number of years and we
will then give you all the rights as it becomes public domain"
is/was the basic contract upon which copyright was founded.

However, in the last three decades copyright as been extended,
and then extended again, on top of two previous extensions and
now no one can expect to live long enough for any new copyright
to expire in their lifetimes, thus breaking the continuum of an
ordinary person's right to pass on our culture.

The result is that we become dependent on THEM for our culture,
rather than being the independent purveyors of our own culture!

It's basically George Orwell's 1984, in which Big Brother tells
us our history, after carefully rewriting it over and over till
no one actually remembers what actually happened.

We need to be able to keep and publish our own history, in ways
open to individual people, not merely consumers of Big Brother's
version of history, which is all we will get if no one publishes
their own editions soon enough after the original publication to
be sure the public recollection is fresh enough.

The real question:

Is culture OURS,
or is it THEIRS?

***

To begin with, copyright was never designed to belong as rights
of an author, but rather as rights of a single corporation, The
Stationers Company.  Copyright was written of The Stationers by
The Stationers for the Stationers, and, as such, this copyright
failed to become a workable law in 1557, simply because the law
was so obviously a rip off that not only did no one obey it, as
fact of history, but no one even tried to enforce it.

Several other attempts to write such one sided copyright law by
The Stationers Company took place in the years before and after
1557 and also failed, each so dramatically that they never made
it into the history books.

These early copyright laws gave all rights to The Stationers or
The Stationers Company ane none to the authors, until, finally,
in 1709-10 several versions of The Statute of Anne were written
and finally were merged into what became the basis for a modern
series of copyright laws that followed.

Thanks!!!

So Nice To Hear From You!

Michael

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