Research Summary
Research Summary
The new property: computational property, intellectual property, and cyberspace
Description
The objective of this project is to design ownership regimes for property located in cyberspace, such as websites, links for e-travel, applets that run on distant processors, and other related computational species. The driving assumption of the project is that the current portfolio of intellectual property rights (that is, patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets) is inadequate for the many new species of assets that are proliferating on the web. The new regimes can vary along two dimensions. First, the number of categories in the law's IP portfolio can be expanded from the current Gang of Four (patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret) to many more. For example, a link in a commercially available portal (say of the My-x.com kind) can perhaps, analogous to real property, be viewed as an easement. Second, it may be possible to privatize parts of the current patent system in a manner that is a cross between the refereed journal article and the privately set standard. In the public sector, these proposals are aimed at informing the development of policy. In the private sector, the work is expected to produce decision methods for the development, acquisition and sale of computational assets. The project is part of a continuing research program aimed at developing a better insight into the likely character of emergent institutions of informational and computational property, similar to the emergence of corporations, securities and employment as the key institutions for supporting the first industrial revolution.