Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
You've been using the term IP wrong, Steve. It does not refer to the idea, because you cannot own an idea. IP refers to the pieces of paper that give you the right of sole use of the idea.
Your books are not your intellectual property, Steve. Your IP is the right to copy and distribute the books. Thus, unless someone tricks you into signing away the copyright, your property has not been stolen.
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But that's really just semantics. The point of IP is to secure that no one can profit off of the use of an idea registered to me, except me, unless I say it's okay.
That includes ideas that are considered slightly altered from mine, but clearly based on my idea. For instance, if someone writes a story about a Captain Keister flying a space freighter called the Betty with a purple-skinned man from Venus at the helm, a lizard-girl running cargo and a cook who grows orchids in a storage locker, I can sue that person for violation of my copyright, even though the material isn't exactly the same as mine. That's because IP law protects the idea, not just the paper it's printed on.
And that's why IP protects electronic files: It's the idea,
not the medium, that is being protected.
There's a lot of inventive word-play that goes on around here, used to justify people's positions. Some of it is legal wordplay. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to whether or not you took something that doesn't belong to you.