• 0 Posts
  • 3 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle
  • A human can start off a process by their own design, but with the details implemented by phenomena not in their direct control, and still copyright the resulting work.

    If I take a funnel full of paint and let it drip onto a canvas in a pattern caused by the movement of a pendulum, and incorporate random movement from wind on a windy day, how would you assign a “percentage” of human creation there? What about letting the hot desert sun melt some crayons into another canvas where I placed the crayons but didn’t control the drip pattern? What if I record some barking dogs but auto tune it into a melody? Or photograph the natural beauty of a wave crashing onto shore? These are all things that can be copyrighted, even if they’re inherently dependent on natural phenomena not in the artist’s control, because the process itself is initiated or captured or designed by a human author.


  • First of all, “Intellectual property[sic]” is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word “property” in that term is biased loaded language.

    You don’t get to redefine words like “property” or “intellectual property” how you see fit, completely untethered to the way the legal system uses those terms with specific meaning.

    Intellectual property rights include all of those things, in the same way that copyright can include copyright over text or musical compositions or sound recordings or photographs or building architectures. But note that copyright over each of those types of media is subject to its own rights and rules, and you’ll need to apply the correct rules to the correct contexts. But it’s still useful to group similar concepts together, and have a name for the category. That’s why people refer to intellectual property.

    A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right.

    This is a naive take. Property rights are natural rights? No, property rights are defined by the legal system of whatever sovereign nation you’re in. And they’re limited by whatever rules of that legal system are.

    If I own land in the U.S., I’m still required to pay taxes on it, and to enforce my property rights against adverse possession, lest I lose that property to the state or to a squatter. If I don’t record my ownership with the county recorder I might lose the property to someone else who comes along and records them buying it from the guy who sold it to me (and fraudulently sold it twice).

    Property rights can be chopped up and distributed in different ways. I might own a house but rent it to a tenant and have a mortgage on it from the bank, each of whom will have certain rights over that land, despite me being the owner.

    And property can apply to tangible things (a painting, a car), intangible things (a checking account balance at the bank, a certificateless share of stock in a corporation, a domain name registered with ICANN), and all sorts of concepts in between (the right to use a particular mailbox in a post office, an easement to use a driveway over my neighbor’s land, the right to use my name and image in a commercial, a futures contract that entitles me to take delivery of a whole bunch of wheat on a particular day at a particular time in the future). All of those are property, and recognized as property rights in U.S. law.

    What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It’s a license, not a right.

    Licenses are a right to do something. In fact, copyright owners assign licenses to others to use that intellectual property all the time.

    And the copyright itself is not property over an idea. It’s the right to copy something specific that has already been fixed in a particular physical medium. If you come up with an idea for a melody, you don’t own the copyright until you write it down.

    You’re just pretty far off base because you don’t understand how broad the word “property” is, and you don’t seem to want to examine just how man-made other forms of property are, and think that copyright is something special and different.


  • Motorola Mobility was spun off from Motorola in 2012 and sold to Google. Then Google sold it in 2014 to Lenovo, the Chinese company that had also previously bought IBM’s entire personal computer business.

    Original Motorola, renamed Motorola Solutions, retained the rights to the Motorola name in everything except cell phones, and continued to manufacture radio and communications equipment and other signal processing equipment (including stuff like cable TV boxes). They remain a major contractor for militaries, law enforcement, and fire/EMS emergency responders.

    If we’re talking about Motorola cell phones, we’re talking about the Chinese owned company, not the American owned company.