Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
A book is intellectual property (or, to be more specific, its contents are). Only concrete expressions of ideas, such as books, chemical formulas, industrial processes, logos, etc, are protected by intellectual property laws. There's no protection for ideas in the abstract.
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Ideas are never concrete. Copyright is the ability to copy a work, no more, no less. A physical book, either paper or digital, is not intellectual property. If I buy a paper book, few are going to claim that physical book is intellectual property and thus the author controls what I can do with that specific physical book. I can do whatever I want to with that book, except make a copy of it. I can make a copy of it or some portion of it in the United States as long as I stay within the bounds of fair use. I can make copies of digital content for my personal use because the Supreme Court decided that was covered under fair use. Obviously, copyright law is different elsewhere.
One thing that the idea of Intellectual Property has done is confuse people by trying to bring the various forms of government granted monopolies under one concept. Patents, trade marks and copyright, three different concepts which are currently under the Intellectual Properties umbrella are treated very differently under the law. When you talk about concrete expressions of ideas, you are talking about patents.
With copyright, you aren't protecting the idea or the concrete expression of an idea, you are protecting a specific work and works that might be derived from that original work. Thus, you can't copyright the idea of a wizard's school, but you can copyright the Harry Potter series and sue someone who writes or performs a work that you can convince a jury is derived from the Harry Potter series.