Novell's Faustian Pact

People sometimes use the term "intellectual property" to refer to their creative works, be it software, a book or music. It's meant to imply that the ideas contained therein are their property. It is an unfortunate term in that it implies that there exists a moral justification for the notion that ideas can be owned.

We can all agree that simple ideas cannot be owned. Arabic (or Indian?) numerals are not licensed to the western world forcing Rome or Napoleon to use Roman numerals. We don't pay a royalty to the French for the use of the word "garage" or to Italy for the use of the word "circus". No one is paying America for the use of the word "internet" or for the basic design of the airplane, the phonograph or the light bulb.

In the legal world there are three areas that can potentially cover this subject. There's trademark, copyright and patents. Trademark (and servicemark) refers to a particular companies products and services. We can all agree that Coke and Ford deserve to have their trademarks protected. I think it's OK for Mozilla to protect their trademarks as they see fit (though I'm typing this in Iceweasel). Patents are meant for true innovations. I've seen a US patent granted recently for romantic novels. Might there be any prior art there? Romeo and Juliet was just a rip off of Pyramus and Thisbe if memory serves. The proper law to apply to software is copyright. Same as music, books, photography and so on, software is a creative work. It is a much larger collection of ideas than the word "garage", put together in a certain way for a desired effect and is therefore worthy of copyright protection, but patenting software is like granting a monopoly on a word or the idea of hyperlinks. It's kind of silly.

So the term "intellectual monopoly" is more factually correct and avoids the implication of legitimacy to the term "intellectual property", which is an oxymoron. ... In my humble opinion.