Intellectual Privilege or Imaginary Property?
"Does it matter what we call it?" asks Cory Doctorow in an interesting article today in the Guardian: "Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism.
Fundamentally, the stuff we call "intellectual property" is just knowledge - ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets, databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into its development to realise that value.
Tom Bell calls it "Intellectual Privilege" in a book he's writing under the title Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good, a draft of which is now available on his blog with the same title, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Someone else calls it "Imaginary Property" in the comments on this post by Professor Lawrence Lessig about Tom Bell on "Intellectual Privilege".
We don't have strong feelings one way or another what you call it, as long as it's IP.
