Intellectual property
[7] To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to certain information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time.
[9] Additionally, investments in intellectual goods suffer from appropriation problems: Landowners can surround their land with a robust fence and hire armed guards to protect it, but producers of information or literature can usually do little to stop their first buyer from replicating it and selling it at a lower price.
According to legal scholar Mark Lemley, it was only at this point that the term really began to be used in the United States (which had not been a party to the Berne Convention),[6] and it did not enter popular usage there until passage of the Bayh–Dole Act in 1980.
Approximately 200 years after the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, a patent represents a legal right obtained by an inventor providing for exclusive control over the production and sale of his mechanical or scientific invention.
[18]The term can be found used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown, in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own ... as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears.
"[20] In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846.
An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem, which may be a product or a process, and generally has to fulfill three main requirements: it has to be new, not obvious and there needs to be an industrial applicability.
[32]: 17 To enrich the body of knowledge and to stimulate innovation, it is an obligation for patent owners to disclose valuable information about their inventions to the public.
[40] A trade secret is a formula, practice, process, design, instrument, pattern, or compilation of information which is not generally known or reasonably ascertainable, by which a business can obtain an economic advantage over competitors and customers.
[7] To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to the information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time.
Recently there has also been much debate over the desirability of using intellectual property rights to protect cultural heritage, including intangible ones, as well as over risks of commodification derived from this possibility.
[48] In 2013, the United States Patent and Trademark Office approximated that the worth of intellectual property to the U.S. economy is more than US$5 trillion and creates employment for an estimated 18 million American people.
[51] The WIPO treaty and several related international agreements underline that the protection of intellectual property rights is essential to maintaining economic growth.
The second is to promote, as a deliberate act of Government policy, creativity and the dissemination and application of its results and to encourage fair trading which would contribute to economic and social development.
"[52] The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) states that "effective enforcement of intellectual property rights is critical to sustaining economic growth across all industries and globally".
"[66] Writer Ayn Rand argued in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal that the protection of intellectual property is essentially a moral issue.
[68] During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, IP has been a consideration in punishment of the aggressor through trade sanctions,[69] has been proposed as a method to prevent future wars of aggression involving nuclear weapons,[70] and has caused concern about stifling innovation by keeping patent information secret.
This safe harbor does not exist in the US unless the research is done for purely philosophical purposes, or to gather data to prepare an application for regulatory approval of a drug.
Many detractors think this term specially serves the doctrinal agenda of parties opposing reform in the public interest or otherwise abusing related legislations, and that it disallows intelligent discussion about specific and often unrelated aspects of copyright, patents, trademarks, etc.
[81] Stallman advocates referring to copyrights, patents and trademarks in the singular and warns against abstracting disparate laws into a collective term.
He argues that, "to avoid spreading unnecessary bias and confusion, it is best to adopt a firm policy not to speak or even think in terms of 'intellectual property'.
"[82] Similarly, economists Boldrin and Levine prefer to use the term "intellectual monopoly" as a more appropriate and clear definition of the concept, which, they argue, is very dissimilar from property rights.
[89] Entrepreneur and politician Rick Falkvinge and hacker Alexandre Oliva have independently compared George Orwell's fictional dialect Newspeak to the terminology used by intellectual property supporters as a linguistic weapon to shape public opinion regarding copyright debate and digital rights management (DRM).
According to the Committee, when systems fail to do so, they risk infringing upon the human right to food and health, and to cultural participation and scientific benefits.
[114]In 2005, the Royal Society of Arts launched the Adelphi Charter, aimed at creating an international policy statement to frame how governments should make balanced intellectual property law.
Critics like Philip Bennet argue that this does not provide adequate protection against cultural appropriation of indigenous knowledge, for which a collective IP regime is needed.
[127] Also with respect to copyright, the American film industry helped to change the social construct of intellectual property via its trade organization, the Motion Picture Association (MPA).
In amicus briefs in important cases, in lobbying before Congress, and in its statements to the public, the MPAA has advocated strong protection of intellectual property rights.
Additionally Congress's awareness of the position of the United States as the world's largest producer of films has made it convenient to expand the conception of intellectual property.
The industry has had victories against some services, including a highly publicized case against the file-sharing company Napster, and some people have been prosecuted for sharing files in violation of copyright.
