Intellectual Property Licensing, Too Meta
2015-Apr-16, Thursday 19:34![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thorfinnHere's a thought about Intellectual Property (movies, photos, books, music, writing, software, patents, etc), and licensing, and why it's all such a mess.
Intangible things of any kind are hard to understand to begin with. Intellectual Property is intangible. Then IP laws are meta IP about IP. Then IP licenses (the things that let you legally use IP) are themselves IP that operate in the context of IP laws.
It's seriously no wonder that people don't understand, and quite reasonably don't even want to understand, Intellectual Property licenses in pretty much any context you like. They're several levels of intangible meta away from even the first level of the intangibility.
And I didn't even mention jurisdictional issues. Ugh.
Really everyone just wants to make cool stuff and maybe make a living out of it. But the legal side of it is actually a giant complicated mess of intangible stuff that almost nobody cares about.
So if you're ever wondering about "Apple vs Samsung", or "Patent trolls", or "creative commons", or "open source" licenses, and why it all seems like it's a horrible mess... Well, yeah. It's not simple. It never will be. :-/ That kinda sucks.
Intangible things of any kind are hard to understand to begin with. Intellectual Property is intangible. Then IP laws are meta IP about IP. Then IP licenses (the things that let you legally use IP) are themselves IP that operate in the context of IP laws.
It's seriously no wonder that people don't understand, and quite reasonably don't even want to understand, Intellectual Property licenses in pretty much any context you like. They're several levels of intangible meta away from even the first level of the intangibility.
And I didn't even mention jurisdictional issues. Ugh.
Really everyone just wants to make cool stuff and maybe make a living out of it. But the legal side of it is actually a giant complicated mess of intangible stuff that almost nobody cares about.
So if you're ever wondering about "Apple vs Samsung", or "Patent trolls", or "creative commons", or "open source" licenses, and why it all seems like it's a horrible mess... Well, yeah. It's not simple. It never will be. :-/ That kinda sucks.
