Understanding Computers and Society — Intellectual Property
Questions We Need to Answer Right Now — Part 3
The issue of IP comes up quite often in the news and is especially prevalent in court cases between tech giants. But few of us understand what the whole aspect of Intellectual Property entails. This section will give a brief overview of what IP means, the types of IP and the subjectivity ambiguity brings to the field.
[This article is part 3 of a series of article exploring the various dimensions of computers that give rise to questions and issues pertaining to society. You can find part 2 (Privacy and Freedom) here.]
Intellectual Property is different from Material Property (something you can own). IP, according to Wikipedia, is “a work or invention that is the result of creativity, such as a manuscript or a design, to which one has rights and for which one may apply for a patent, copyright, trademark, etc.” As you can imagine, creative solutions don’t do too well if you keep them locked away in a drawer. Also, it’s not possible to “own” the only copy of an idea. Thus, IP laws focus on making sure your idea is not used by anyone, in any way without your approval.
With that in mind, we defined 5 kinds of IP to deal with the mess — Trade Secrets, Trademarks, Patents, Design Patent, and Copyrights. Let’s discuss them one-by-one.
Trade Secrets are…well…secrets. It works when you can use a secret recipe you’ve developed and people can interface with it without you giving away the recipe. Common examples are Coca-Cola’s secret recipe, Google’s search engine algorithm, and Mr. Krab’s Krabby Patty Secret Formula. The catch is that it is up to you to defend your trade secret. If a competitor, say Plankton from Spongebob, steals it — it’s game over. You can’t take him to court and win!
Patents are public filings of your novel invention, detailed enough for others to replicate. Yes, you own your idea by making it public (crazy, I know right?). You own it and, for the 20 years since filing, a margin of any profits made by using it. The rationale behind patents is to provide an incentive for innovation while making sure society as a whole benefits from the disclosure. Recent examples of Patent Infringement cases include Kodak vs Polaroid, Samsung vs Apple on “slide to unlock”.
Design Patents are interesting. It is a means to protect the look or feel of a product. Some common examples are the curvy bottle of the old Coca-Cola, the kidney-shaped grills in front of a BMW, the curvature around the old iPhones. Even if I was to strip away all the branding and give you those designs, chances are you’d be able to tell which company it was from.
Trademarks protect the name and logo of an organization. It is why you can’t just start a chain with DcMonalds with the trademark logo (in red instead of yellow, mind you) and sell a Big Mac. Similarly, you can’t use the Apple logo as you please. These protect against fake goods and enable a company to build its brand image — it serves as an indicator of quality. Notice how you think good build quality when you see the Apple Logo on something /s. Trademarks can become so generic that they stop being a trademark (example: bandaid, aspirin). Interestingly enough, to stop that from happening, Adobe instructed staff to correct web forum posting where people used the word photoshop as a verb!
Lastly, Copyrights do not cover the idea themselves, but the “expression” of it. So this covers artistic/creative work such as books, plays, and movies. The copyright holder can decide, for 95 years, how their work is reproduced, displayed in public, or used as a base for derivative work. Copyrighted products, at least a brief portion of it, can be used in the name of “Fair Use”. So if a chapter of non-fiction textbook was to be used in our class as reading, the university can photocopy at most 10% of the book and distribute it! It’s commonly seen in Academia but is not limited there. Questions during copyright infringement vs fair use trials include the nature of the work, the amount of work used, the effect it’ll have for the market, etc. There are also Public Domain works — things which are not copyrightable by anyone: titles, facts, ideas, work assigned by the author as public domain and work that enters the public domain after copyright expiry.
Phew, that was a lot. With that out of the way, let’s talk about Software Copyrights, which, I believe, is a lot more interesting to the readers of this article. Firstly, you can copyright the implementation of an idea, not the idea itself. Secondly, laws protect the executable — NOT the source code; that’s your responsibility much like a trade secret. These rules were made because software and algorithms were considered more mathematical than mechanical. But, this all got muddy when in 1981, the US Supreme Court ruled that software could be patented. This angered the supporters of the open-source movement — a philosophical stand that urges the free sharing, and even modification, of source code because it encourages collaboration (see UNIX, LINUX, Firefox, Python, Compilers, etc). Note that these people do not prevent others from making money off shared content. While these have produced wonderful things, so has corporate tech. There is no reason to completely dismiss the rights-based and utilitarian argument when it comes to software, much like any other IP.
The court cases are not as straightforward as the discussion above. Famous examples are the selfie taken by a monkey, with Slater’s camera, the Oracle vs Google case regarding the Android API, Sonny Bono aka Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act, Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Over the past decades, legislators have wrangled with questions such as “Is recording a TV show for future consumption illegal?”, “Is downloading Music illegal?”. Most recently, and most relevant to this piece, the IP rights of Algorithms have entered the limelight.
Furthermore, deeper questions are probing the foundations of IP rights. Did you know that the song “Happy Birthday To You” is protected under copyright law till 2030, and it belongs to TimeWarner? Is it not arguable that controlling who gets to use your IP can aggravate further the power imbalances in various aspects of society? How can we decide what a “reasonable amount of time” is, when considering the expiry period? Isn’t the adoption of DRM schemes (Digital Rights Management schemes, commonly implemented with some sort of encryption) making it impossible for fair use and even infringing privacy (unique identifier used to track usage)?
People can’t agree on whether current IP rights harm or benefit society as a whole. In this confusion, we have seen a rise to a, you could say hybrid, solution such as the Creative Commons.
Do you think the current IP Laws have kept up with the times? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
I’ve tried to break the multi-part series down to readable chunks, tackling one or two issues at a time, so that the main message is not diluted. If you have any feedback regarding the article, feel free to reach out to me. If you liked the article and think more people should know about it, pass it to a friend!
This piece was inspired by CSC300: Computers and Society, taken at the University of Toronto during Fall 2019, under Ishtiaque Ahmed. Please note that the opinions in this piece are my own.
