If you created it, it belongs to you… except when you don’t.
Both national and international laws control who owns “intellectual property,” the products of their creative genius. Copyright laws govern written works, narratives in film and television broadcasts, and most photographic and motion picture images and icons. Trademarks, service marks and the lowercase “r” sign protect the corporation’s logos and advertising art; in some cases, they even protect the source in the corporation’s advertising. Patents protect inventions.
However, in the age of the Internet, everything seems to be on the line and violations of intellectual property rights happen a million times a minute. The Internet has become the “Wild West” of intellectual property rights: go ahead and claim your own idea, but watch all the black hats in the known world claim it as their own. Blogs are constantly attacked for their good ideas, and “tweets” are re-tweeted without regard to the rights of the original “poet”. Every unauthorized download steals someone’s good idea; every copy of a good design appropriates someone’s precious work of art.
If you’re still in school, chances are your teachers or professors have serious warnings and severe penalties for plagiarism, by far the most common violation of intellectual property rights. Especially in a college or university, where careers and fortunes depend on the quality of a scholar’s ideas, intellectual property theft represents an extremely serious crime. In the workplace, these rights become serious business. Consider, as prime examples, the popular queuing formulas. Their brands are based on their hallmarks, and a small fortress of proprietary protection paper and flavor safeguards protect those soft drink recipes. In a more peculiar example, Harry Caray, the longtime voice of the Chicago Cubs, took steps to protect his signature exclamation “Holy Cow!” as his intellectual property, preventing other sports commentators from imitating him without crediting him. Very technically, garage bands should pay for the rights to the songs they cover in the same way that theater producers should pay for the rights to make new productions of old works.
Industrial espionage takes intellectual property issues to the extreme extreme. If Acme Anvil Company is developing a new carbon composite anvil that is sure to fall on the roadrunner every time, Universal Anvil Works certainly wants to see what their chemistries and designs look like, of course, so that Universal can copy and improve on the product of acme. . Even the first crazy idea for the new anvil is Acme’s intellectual property, and using it without paying constitutes theft. However, in a competitive market, free enterprise and war have much in common.
So what does a lawyer do when specializing in intellectual property? The practice is to protect original works and make sure people pay for “fair use” of a creator’s original inventions. Yes, you may photocopy the entire biochemistry textbook… after paying the copyright holder for the right to copy it. If the publisher catches you stealing copies of his biochemistry masterpiece, he can collect compensatory and punitive damages, because everything about that book, down to the ink color and the photo on page 237, belongs to that publisher. The publisher’s attorney secured the copyright, and now the attorney is going after the smuggler with the full force of the law on the publisher’s side.
If you’re a creative artist of any kind, learn how to protect your intellectual property. If you’re a law student, consider majoring in intellectual property rights, because it promises to remain one of the hottest areas throughout the 21st century.
