Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
Laws and analogies for physical products don't apply. Copyright and IP laws are fundamentally different. This has nothing to do with property rights.
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IP
means "intellectual
property."
Further, the copyright statute specifically refers to copyright as having an "owner." If something can have an owner, it's property.
And finally, the law does not consider ownership of property in terms of its physical existence. The law considers "property" as what lawyers refer to as "a bundle of rights." Rights in property are the same sort of thing as copyright & IP. That is, they are legal concepts, which can be apportioned in different ways.
For example, you can have a "life estate" in a house. That's the right to live in it, or to sell the right to live in it, measured by the length of your life. This is an example of property being apportioned in time.
Or you might be a landlord, who rents an apartment to the renter. The renter has the exclusive right to the use of the property over a period of time. Except that the landlord might retain the right to entry for stated purposes, such as repair & maintenance. That part of the apportionment over time is reserved.
Or take money. Our parents might put a million bucks into the bank for you and me to share the income on - I get the first thousand dollars of interest, you get the next five hundred, and we divide the rest (they always liked me best.) Here, ownership of the income stream has been apportioned, apart from ownership of the capital.
Or take copyright. I can sell you the right to use my copyright in limited ways - say, only in a movie as background music, or only for playing on the radio. Dividing it by usage. Same way as I can sell you the right to grow corn on my land, but not wheat.
Property, legally considered, consists of nothing more than ownership of different kind of rights, and copyright is merely one kind of such property right.
The very purpose of copyright law is to quantify the nature and duration of the ownership of the property called "copyright."