Introduction to Intellectual Property: Crash Course IP 1 Video Lecture | Understanding IPR, Copyrights, Trademarks and all - Professional Skills

Hi, I'm Stan Muller. This is Crash Course and today we begin our miniseries on Intellectual Property.
Hey, isn't the entire concept of
Intellectual Property illegitimate?
I mean, how can we justify locking up the world of science and arts so corporations, publishing houses
and other gatekeepers can control what we know and what we think! Information wants to be free, man!
Hey, me from the past! There's a Stan from the past! This is great!
Stan: Hey! Me from the past! There's a Stan
from the past, this is great!
Anyway. I can tell by looking at your vacant and bloodshot eyes that you've been up all night
downloading Chumbawumba records over a
dialup connection. I remember those days,
and I remember desperately trying to cling to any ethos
that justified your rampant copyright infringement.
That is if you ever participated in such activities.
And even if you had participated in said infringing
activities, the statute of limitations has likely
run out. I don't even know what LimeWire is!
[Theme Music]
I like how this is getting started, because
Stan from the past raises some interesting points!
There's a good chance that he, and
a lot of you watching this video, might think
about aspects of Intellectual Property as
outdated and pretty much irrelevant.
Maybe lots of you don't think of it at all!
That line, "Information wants to be free",
has been used to argue that current intellectual
properly laws are outdated, over-broad and
generally awful.
The quotation is attributed to Stewart Brand and he
said this to a group of computer programmers in 1984.
"On the one hand Information wants to be expensive,
because it's so valuable. The right information
in the right place just changes your life.
On the other hand, information wants to be
free, because the cost of getting it out is
getting lower and lower all the time. So you
have these two fighting against each other."
The full quote, which you hardly ever hear,
actually spells out the major tension between
intellectual property and technology quite well.
And it did it more than 30 years ago, when
the digital age was just beginning. As information
technology becomes more and more pervasive
and important in our day-to-day lives in the
information society, information itself becomes
exponentially more important and more valuable.
Paradoxically, as our information technology
improves, and as our computers and connections
get better and faster, and sharing becomes
easier, we're less able to control the copying
and dissemination of this incredibly valuable
information. The law of supply and demand
pushes down the information's value.
This tension is nothing new.
Technology, especially in the context of copyright
law, has always presented challenges.
Socrates's and Plato's 'Phaedrus' bemoaned
the advent of books, arguing that they "will
implant forgetfulness in [human beings'] souls;
they will cease to exercise memory because
they rely on that which is written, calling
things to remembrance no longer from within
themselves, but by means of external marks."
One way that humans have attempted to deal
with these new technologies, with varying
success, is by passing laws. The scourge of the piano
roll was contemplated in the 1909 Copyright Act,
the photocopier in 1976, and the Internet was covered
in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
But we're going to try to avoid this simplified
intellectual property versus technology binary.
The idea that we have to choose between devaluing
the fruits of intellectual talent and labor,
or devaluing the revolutionary information
sharing capacity of our networks, is wrong-headed.
The more interesting and more difficult question
is how we can strike a balance; how we can
incentivize and promote this revolution in
the way we share information, while at the
same time incentivizing and promoting the
production of creative works and inventions
by having respect for the human beings that
actually created them.
The difference between today's debates and
those that took place 100 years ago is that
intellectual property pervades our lives more
and more every day.
This is especially true for anyone viewing
this video. I know that about 90% of you view
Crash Course in a web browser, so consider
the layers of IP in this very YouTube page.
A lot of what you're looking at is covered
by copyright. This video, for example, is
covered as a motion picture work. The website
itself is considered a literary work.
The Thought Bubble, the theme song, and the
video you watched right before this one, all
have copyright protection. The software that
streams the video is also a literary work.
The web browser you're using is most likely
registered as a computer program, as is the
operating system. Lest you Linux weirdos think
that you don't have a copyright on your OS:
You do. You're just not enforcing it.
Even your comments could be covered by copyright.
That haiku you just posted:
"Who is this person?
What happened to Mr. Green?
Dislike. Unsubscribe."
That's copyright-able! When you agreed to
this [image of YouTube user agreement],
you granted YouTube a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive license to use your content in any way they see fit.
There are also patents in play here. There's
proprietary video streaming technology, and
many of the components in your computer are patented. But wait! There's more!
YouTube is a registered trademark, and if
you saw an ad before this video, there was
most likely a trademark in there. This is
a trademark
and under this sticker is an image
of a piece of fruit, also a trademark.
And behind the camera, our most precious and
valuable mark, Mark Olsen. Mark Olsen, everybody!
The search algorithm that got you here? That's
a trade secret. My appearance in this video,
and subsequent marketing of commemorative
mugs with my likeness fixed on each one- that
implicates my right of publicity.
If you're watching this on an iPhone or an Android, there's a whole other world of copyrights and patents that apply.
When you start to deconstruct it like this,
it's dizzying. But despite all this complexity,
most of the time the system moves along with
a fluidity that sometimes makes it easy to
put it out of your mind. Kind of like the
internal functioning of your digestive tract.
But it's there. Always there. Gurgling and churning
and functioning. Did anybody order lunch?
Now most of this fluidity and seamlessness
is borne on the back of hundreds or thousands
of lawsuits, many of them against Google,
thousands of pages of intricately complex
contracts, and hundreds of millions of take
down notices.
The point is that none of us, or very few
of us, can go about our daily lives without
being impacted by intellectual property. It's
only when it hits home, like when you receive that
cease-and-desist letter from a trademark attorney
for opening a restaurant called Burger Queen,
or digital rights management software stops you from listening to your iTunes downloads on your Zune.
Maybe your YouTube video gets taken down
because of that T-Swizzie song in the background
(that's what the kids call Taylor Swift).
Maybe you get a letter from your internet
service provider, informing you that someone
using your account has downloaded every episode
of Game of Thrones and that if it keeps up
you may be fined or imprisoned- or beheaded!
That's when it flares up.
Flare up! God, are we still on the digestive
tract metaphor? Somebody get me a Tums. Tums,
by the way, registered trademark of the GlaxoSmithKline
group of companies.
Most of us encounter IP only on its borders.
We hear horror stories about the motion picture and recording industry suing grandmothers.
We watch those unskippable FBI messages warning us about the consequences
of copyright infringement, or we complain about paying thousands of dollars per pill for medicine.
We tend to encounter intellectual property
law in places where we, as users, are basically
being told 'no'. And being told 'no' over
and over again is irritating, especially when
these "no's" don't seem to make any sense.
And they're really irritating when they come
with threats of fines or imprisonment.
So in this course we're going to focus less
on enforcement and the "no's" and more on
the part of intellectual property that often
says 'yes', 'sometimes', 'maybe', 'it is certain',
or even 'ask again later'.
I'm speaking, of course, of the "Liquid filled
die agitator containing a die having raised
indicia on the facets thereof", registered as patent
US 3119621, which you might know as the Magic 8-Ball.
Before we get too far, we should probably
define intellectual property. This is going
to get pretty abstract, so let's go to the
Thought Bubble.
The theoretical definition of intellectual
property would begin by saying that it is:
"Nonphysical property that stems from, is identified as, and whose value is based on an idea or some ideas."
There has to be some element of novelty; the
thing that we describe as intellectual property
can't be commonplace, or generally known,
in the society where it's created, at the
time that it becomes property. You can't claim that
you invented the wheel or that you wrote Moby Dick.
Even though the source material for all IP
is social -- the inputs are our education, our
human interactions, and basically all the
sensory data around us that we take in -- the
thing that we call 'IP' is the product of
us putting together all these social inputs
into something that we're gonna call "the
idea".
"Only the concrete, tangible, or physical embodiments
of the idea are protected by intellectual property law."
The idea has to be fixed into a form and location in which humans have access to it. That could be a novel,
or a logo, or a liquid filled die agitator containing a die having raised indicia on the facets thereof.
Thanks, Thought Bubble. So in its purest and best form, IP is the propertization of intellectual effort and talent.
In its most corrupt and worst form,
intellectual property can be, and has been
used by the propertied and powerful to protect
concentrated markets and broken business models.
At its very worst, it can be used a a censorship
tool.
Intellectual property differs somewhat from
real property like cars or houses because
it's limited in duration and scope. For example,
copyrights last for the life of the author plus 70 years.
Copyrighted works can be copied under the
fair use exception for certain personal or
publicly beneficial uses. Let's say a book
reviewer quotes long passages of a novel,
then pans the book. It's likely the author
of the book wouldn't grant permission for
this type of use. But we want to encourage
informed public discourse. So there's a good
chance it would be found to be a fair use.
Patent laws carved out a limited experimental
use exception that permits minimal use of
a patent for amusement, to satisfy idle
curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry.
Again, the patent owner probably wouldn't like this,
but the law wants to encourage individual
tinkering. Both these limitations exist to
serve the primary objective of intellectual
property: that's to promote the progress of science
and useful arts by increasing our stock of knowledge.
So in this series, we're going to focus on
the 3 main branches of intellectual property:
copyrights, patents, and trademarks. We won't
have time to get into some of the lesser cousins
of the family like trade secrets or the right
of publicity, but all of these are included
under the umbrella of intellectual property.
So in the coming weeks we're going to try
to get at some of the nuts and bolt of what
intellectual property is, because like it
or not, IP is only going to become more and
more relevant as our lives become more and
more digital.
So regardless of what or how you feel about
any aspect of IP, it's probably a good idea
to have some basic knowledge of it. It doesn't
matter if you're a consumer or a creator of
protected content or both. Is understanding
IP going to help you?
You may rely on it. See you next week.
Crash Course: Intellectual Property is filmed
in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz here in sunny
Indianapolis, Indiana, and it's made with
the help of all of these nice workers for
hire.
If you'd like to help us make Crash Course
in a monetary way that doesn't imply any ownership
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but the greatest perk of all is the satisfaction of
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We'll see you next week.