Re:Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage
by lotsofmangos on Sunday May 18, 2014 @05:28PM
(#7764507)
I'd say that IP's origin is in the imagination, and only a subset is also from the intellect, the intellect being only a part of creative thought.
This is plainly obvious by viewing the general mass of the output of some of the major IP industries, such as Hollywood.
Intellect is not required to generate IP, but imagination generally is.
Personally I don't care that much if this makes the term seem less weighty, perhaps the term is currently overweighted and made to seem more lofty than it really is.
I mean, sure IP is used in areas like like biotech research into cancer treatments, but it also applies to stuff like copies of a kids drawing of a peanut man with the last minute addition of a monocle and spats, and I feel that to refer to the latter as intellectual is to do abuse to the word, however both examples could be accurately said to be products of the imagination.
Re:Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage
by tptacek on Monday May 19, 2014 @01:31PM
(#7768633)
Similar sophistry can be used to empty your bank account, because the value of money is also intangible; the money itself is just a number. What natural law prevents the value of that number being altered by application of other numerics? The value of virtually all of the world's currency is imaginary; it's a shared fiction.
My car, my phone, my clothes, and my chess set are examples of property that is not real property, and so in a real/imaginary dichotomy would be imaginary property.
Most property falls into a trichotomy: (1) land and fixed improvements to land, (2) physical things other than land and fixed improvements to land, and (3) non-physical things that have been legally given some aspects of property so as to use society's machinery for dealing with property to deal with these non-physical things.
There is nothing wrong with the current term, "intellectual property" for things in the third part of the trichotomy. It is property by legal definition, and its origin is the intellect.
Another good term would be "intangible property".