Information Technology
Intellectual Property
D. R. Johnson, "Granularity and the Law of Cyberspace," June 20, 1994
"With regard to intellectual property doctrine, the simultaneous bigness and smallness of intellectual artifacts in cyberspace causes serious problems. Should we consider each e-mail message a ‘work’?"
J. D. Brinson and M.F. Radcliffe, "An Intellectual Property Law Primer for Multimedia and Web Developers," 1996
"Generally, the copyright is owned by the person (or persons) who create the work. However, if the work is created by employee within the scope of his or her employment, the employer owns the copyright because it is a 'work for hire.' The copyright law also includes another form of 'work for hire': it applies only to certain types of works which are specially commissioned works. These works include audiovisual works, which will include most multimedia projects. In order to qualify the work as a 'specially commissioned' work for hire, the creator must sign a written agreement stating that it is a 'work for hire' prior to commencing development of the product."
H.H. Perritt, Jr., "Knowbots, Permissions Headers and Contract Law," April 2-3, 1993
"The law recognizes intellectual property because information technology permits one person to get a free ride on another person's investment in creating information value. Creative activity involving information usually is addressed by copyright, although patent has a role to play in protecting innovative means of processing information.
"Intellectual property arose in the context of letterpress printing technology. Newer technologies like xerography and more recently small computer technology and associated work processing and networking have increased the potential for free rides and accordingly increased the pressure on intellectual property."
P. Samuelson, "By Pamela Samuelson"
"The US Constitution empowers Congress to pass laws 'to promote progress of science and [the] useful arts.' Congress has chosen to accomplish this constitutional goal by granting authors a limited set of exclusive rights to their works. Copyright protects all original works of authorship, including such things as personal letters and corporate memoranda, from the moment they are first fixed in a tangible form. This protection attaches automatically by operation of law and lasts for the life of the author plus 50 years."
P. Samuelson, "Is Information Property?," March 1991
"One of the many interesting questions raised by the criminal prosecution of Craig Neidorf is whether the information Neidorf disseminated in his electronic newsletter really was BellSouth's 'private property.' Neidorf was not charged with having wrongfully entered BellSouth's computer system, or with having taken from it an electronic copy of a BellSouth document containing the 911 information. But Neidorf received a copy of the document electronically and inserted portions of it into his newsletter (editing out BellSouth's proprietary notices and certain other information). This was the basis for the criminal charged against him for wire fraud and transporting stolen goods."
B. Kahin, "Scholarly Communication in the Network Environment: Issues of Principle, Policy, and Practice," February 18, 1992
"The globalization of innovation, industry, and commerce has spurred interest in intellectual property as a set of ground rules that may have profound distributive consequences for nations, industries, firms, or forms of economic activity. . . .
"Although copyright defines a baseline of rights and responsibilities between owners and users of information, the basic framework it provides is overlaid by institutional policies, practices, and culture, as well as technological and market realities. . . .
"Joint authorship means joint ownership, and a joint owner can legally license the work for publication--or simply distribute it over the network without permission of the other joint owners. The joint owner who distributes the work is liable to the others only for their share of any money received."
J.P. Sivin and E.R. Bialo, "Ethical Use of Information Technologies in Education: Important Issues for America's Schools," April 1992
"At a middle school where students are encouraged to practice writing skills by sending electronic mail (e-mail) to one another over the school network, one student electronically sends an obscene story to several of his friends, who in turn circulate it widely over the network. When confronted by school authorities, the original student maintains that he has a right to send personal mail of any sort to his friends. . . .
"Computers and related technologies make it easy to write collaboratively (even at multiple locations), compile information from a variety of sources, copy it, revise it, and even destroy earlier versions. As a result, it is often difficult to determine who the author is and who should have ownership rights to the information (DeMaio, 1990). And when ownership is unclear, the ethical imperative to respect the owner's property rights is considerably weakened."
J.P. Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas," quoted at beginning of "Readings on Information and Intellectual Property"
"Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression any more than real estate law might be revised to cover the allocation of broadcasting spectrum (which, in fact, rather resembles what is being attempted here). We will need to develop an entirely new set of methods as befits this entirely new set of circumstances.
"Most of the people who actually create soft property--the programmers, hackers, and Net surfers--already know this. Unfortunately, neither the companies they work for nor the lawyers these companies hire have enough direct experience with nonmaterial goods to understand why they are so problematic. They are proceeding as though the old laws can somehow be made to work, either by grotesque expansion or by force. They are wrong."
O. Roup, "Policy Paradigms of Intellectual Property," October 25, 1995
"Patent and copyright law has considerably difficulty dealing with computer software which is simultaneously mathematical formula, (unprotected) process (patentable) and expression (copyrightable). How the statutes should be applied is far from clear. Perhaps as a result of the murky state of the statutes, the case law is also unclear. . . .
"In a recent article for Wired about a consulting firm called the Global Business Network, Joel Garreau made the argument that predicting the future with any degree of accuracy has become an increasingly futile endeavour. More profitable is scenario planning, where an author or an organization attempts to envision the possible scenarios that could result from the state of the world today, and perhaps decide which scenario would be most desirable (according to the interests of the client) without specifically embracing one scenario as the one which will actually occur."
J.Michael and M. Dykes, "Intellectual Property on the Net," Fall 1995
"Tangible forms of property are easily defined and understood, since they are, by definition, contained in real space. However, on the net, it is the intangible forms of property that confuse everyone. . . .
"Copyrights and patents clearly protect not intellectual value, rather what Esther Dyson calls the 'market value,' or 'what people are willing to pay for intellectual value.' For instance, the first copyrights were granted not to protect the rights of the authors, but to raise revenue and to give the government control over publication . . ."
B. Lehman, "Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure," September 1995
" The average citizen has only the most general understanding that there are patents, copyrights and trademarks, let alone an understanding of the legal, economic and trade issues involved. Indeed, many lawyers do not have an understanding of this highly specialized area of the law. However, as the convergence of computer and communications technology brings the capability of high speed computer and communications networks into our homes, we all have the possibility to become not only authors and users of copyrighted works, but printers, publishers, exhibitors and distributors as well.
"Most people do not have a very clear idea about the role of intellectual property law in encouraging creativity and the importance of intellectual property to our economic well-being."
M. Godwin, "The Law of the Net: Problems and Prospects," September/October 1993
"One area of law will be particularly challenged to adapt to the changes the increasing access to a global network will bring. The law of intellectual property, which includes the law of copyright, will have to adapt to a world in which advances in technology increasingly undercut one's ability to enforce intellectual property rights."
American Intellectual Property Law Association, "An
Overview of Intellectual Property:
What is a Patent, a Trademark, and a Copyright?", 1995
"Copyright is a statutory property right which grants to creators (
authors ) certain exclusive rights in their creations for a limited
duration. Its purpose, as expressed in the Constitution,
is to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by providing
economic incentive for creative activity."
Consortium of College and University Media Centers, "Educational Fair Use Guidelines for Multimedia: A Summary of Concerns"
"In July 1996, the Consortium of College and University Media Centers (CCUMC) completed a two-year process to develop fair use guidelines for the creation of multimedia projects by educators and students. The guidelines, "Educational Fair Use Guidelines for Multimedia," seek to clarify what constitutes 'fair use' of copyrighted materials in an educational context. This fact sheet summarizes the concerns of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and other organizations that rejected the CCUMC guidelines as overly restrictive."
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: AN ASSOCIATION OF RESEARCH LIBRARIES STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES
"The genius of United States copyright law is that it balances the
intellectual property rights of authors, publishers and copyright
owners with society's need for the free exchange of ideas. Taken
together, fair use and other public rights to utilize copyrighted
works, as established in the Copyright Act of 1976, constitute
indispensable legal doctrines for promoting the dissemination of
knowledge, while ensuring authors, publishers and copyright owners
protection of their creative works and economic investments. The
preservation and continuation of these balanced rights in an
electronic environment are essential to the free flow of information
and to the development of an information
infrastructure that serves the public interest."