World Intellectual Property Day: Designing the Future

re: World Intellectual Property Day: Designing the Future

Dave Lane — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 04:46:12 GMT

Hi Jason, you talk about the ability to "protect" ideas and "designs"... actually, the sort of protection you talk about is both anathema to society which, after all, is built on the sharing of ideas, standards, mores, and knowledge. That's what all our media does. That's what the internet is: a giant copying machine. That's what 3D printers will be in the next few years.

I'm all for acknowledging someone else for their work, as is the role of copyright and trademark. I don't however think this idea of "protecting" designs is either necessary or desirable for society. I think it's unfortunate that many people (largely through the self-interested machinations of lawyers) have the idea that they are entitled to "protecting" their ideas. From what? From someone else wanting to do something useful with them?

Protecting the specific *expression* of an idea is one thing, and fine by me - it's a matter of enforcing "credit where credit is due".

But precluding someone else from legitimately having the *same idea* independent of the first person like patents do, is not ok.

I suspect your post is designed to butter people up to accept and expanded role for patents. I think this is a very slippery slope, and a very bad idea.

By all means trademark a unique brand. But leave our shared culture out of it. Put it out there and make money off it by all means, but please don't try to use the law as a way of subjugating creativity, creating artificial scarcity in our new era of abundance.

re: World Intellectual Property Day: Designing the Future

gregory lent — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:22:03 GMT

who bought that, to make it a "day"?

about forty years from now, when collective consciousness is a known reality, your work will look amusingly quaint. :-)

re: World Intellectual Property Day: Designing the Future

harley lewin — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:44:29 GMT

As an attorney engaged in global brand protection efforts, I could not agree more with the above. Unfortunately much of the World is yet to embrace even hard product design when it involves something a bit less tangible than the outline of a product. For example, the United States has well settled law permitting colors as marks. The EU at the same time is grappling with the very issue of color as a mark. While the UK has the Dyson decision, which makes great sense, QC in the UK are intepreting the Dyson decision to require virtual metes and bounds to be specified when registering color on an object. The reality is that packaging, whether in hard retail form in a four-wall environment or on a screen on the internet, serves a huge purpose in bringing a consumer's eye to rest on the object and thence leading that same consumer in a particular direction. Effort needs to be strong and continuing to protect these important branding elements. They signify source the same way any other more traditional trademark does.