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World Intellectual Property Day 2023
Okay, so I didn’t find any food associated with today’s date. What I found was that it’s World Intellectual Property Day.
🍌 Bananas 🍌
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana. ~Bill Gates
That may be true for software, but creative works have a rather extensive life. It varies from country to country, but stories and poems are legally protected in America during the author’s lifetime and 70 years after their death.
This is the difference between a patent and a copyright. A patent only lasts 20 or 15 years after issue. This actually makes sense in modern times because a patent generally applies to an invention. The rate at which we are advancing makes even the 15-20 window unnecessarily long.
Whatever you might have a patent on is probably so antiquated as to be virtually unusable. Sure, we still have cell phones, microwaves and other doodads that we had in the 80s and 90s, but compare the items from then to those from now.
I remember the bag phone we had in the mid-90s. It didn’t have apps. It didn’t tell me the time. It didn’t allow me to set a wakeup alarm or check my bank account and it definitely didn’t fit in my pocket. I have no doubt that there are patents associated with that clunky relic of the past which have expired a while back.
Actually, so what? What would it benefit the bag phone manufacturers to maintain a patent on the technology associated with this blast from the past?
Granted, when we had it, it was cutting edge stuff. It was better than what I had in the 80s (stop somewhere and use a pay phone), but at this point it’s so archaic as to be virtually a museum piece.
On the other hand, copyrights on published works enduring through the natural life of the author and approximately another lifespan posthumously seems to me to make sense. You could say that’s an arbitrary distinction, but I think the creative works are more distinctly associated with the artist than with the inventor.
You know that Jack Ryan is associated with Tom Clancy and Game of Thrones is associated with George R. R. Martin, but what random dude on the street knows who invented the thing that makes toasters pop the bread up or who designed the stack of code that makes the apps on your smart phone visually expand when you double-click on them? Somebody holds those patents or held them before they expired, but who actually knows who that was, apart from the inventor or possibly his/her backers?
We take things and the way they function more or less for granted. The stuff is supposed to be seamless, even invisible.
Art is not. We know who Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Captain America, James Bond and the Grinch are. They’re not generally seamless. They, according to their position in the marketing cycle, are everywhere. Posters, DVD cases, books, lunchboxes, pencil cases, notebooks, stickers and so forth. These things take on a life of their own and can be monetized in countless ways.
So, protecting intellectual property is important. If there’s no incentive for people to invent things or create new works of imagination, society draws to a halt and we’re all the poorer for it.
🔬 World 🌎 Intellectual 🌍 Property 🌏 Day ©️
World Intellectual Property Day (April 26) – Activities and How to Celebrate
It’s been observed, many times, that there’s nothing new under the sun. Very few ideas are genuinely original.
That being said, the way in which these familiar ideas are configured is what makes them original.
For instance, I’ve heard that The Lion King is simply Hamlet with zoo animals. True though this may be, it’s still an entirely new way to approach the core story. The characters have unique names and different personalities from those of Shakespeare’s play. It’s not a one-to-one correspondence.
Of course, Disney has built their company on providing unique (and therefore copyrighted) variations of older tales. Grimm’s Fairy Tales and other medieval folk tales from Europe, Asia and Polynesia have provided feedstock for Disney to apply their particular panache. Because the original works are old, they’re in the Public Domain and are free to reuse, reformulate and rebrand.
Disney is not the only entity to capitalize on this. You might have heard of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Well, Jane Austin has been gone for quite some time. As such, her classic novels are in the Public Domain and are therefore free game. Somebody decided to play a game of What If. As much as I am sick and tired of people rehashing the same old stuff, I have to admit this is a fairly clever use of works that are in the Public Domain.
It’s also a somewhat sombre reminder that nothing lasts forever. Even with an extended copyright of seventy years after the author’s passing, this passes all too soon. Works that are considered almost sacrosanct will soon be at the full use and mercy of people with absolutely no respect for the material.
As much as people love yowling about Amazon’s Rings of Power, this was created with at least a modicum of the control of the Tolkien Estate. The good professor passed in 1973, so the jig is up in 2043. Anybody will be able to do whatever they jolly well please with Middle Earth after that. I can already hear the howls of anguish…
Understanding Intellectual Property (IP)
⚔️ Combat 🛡️ Intellectual ©️ Property 🛡️ Theft ⚔️
I’ve always believed that the best way you combat intellectual property theft is making a product available that is well priced, well timed to market, whether it’s a movie product, TV product, music product, even theme-park product. ~Bob Iger
Sounds nice, but have you tried saving up for a couple days at Disney? Jeez…
It’s also kind of rich coming from a guy whose company kowtows so very deeply to the CCP in order to try to gain access to Chinese theaters and markets, the same CCP who ruthlessly steals intellectual property and generates cheap knockoffs of everything with absolutely no regard to international norms.
But, whatever, they’re not the only ones who do it.
The funny thing is that it’s easy to dump on people who are so brazen about their theft, but less so to address people who engage in fan fiction.
Part of the reason that intellectual property rights are so important to creators is that what you created is uniquely yours, or ought to be.
Some brands see purveyors of fan fiction as a kind of free advertising in the mindspace of people who enjoy your work and genre.
The downside to fan fiction is that, depending on what the fans do with your inventions, it can degrade the value of your work. A lot of major brands come down like a ton of bricks on people who do this, but not all creators can afford to keep up with all the shady reinterpretations of their work.
It’s a fine hair to split. I’m not one to be a stickler, but I could see that while any fan fiction that people might eventually derive from my work is kindly intended and perhaps even reasonably well written, there will be those who aren’t. People who would put my characters in situations I wouldn’t approve of could do a lot of harm if left to their devices.
In such cases, a lot of brands simply maintain a draconian control over the property and quash anything that turns up, whether good or bad.
I don’t expect to be able to do so, but I’m certainly concerned that bad actors could diminish or even damage my brand if they’re able to pass their work off as licensed or otherwise approved of. I’m not particularly litigious, but it’s something I need to keep in mind.
Considering that I’m planning to build my brands to be something that I can leave to my kids as a source of revenue, I do need to give some thought to how these things are handled.
That’s it for this Intellectual Property Hump Day. No food associations were available to choose today, but I hope this has given you food for thought.