The "intellectual property" misnomer

[Ian Bicking]

On Fri, 2003-07-11 at 22:30, Ben Finney wrote:
> > and you proved you're not [confused by the term]
> > [by listing some disparate fields of law that might be referred to by
> > the term]
> 
> This doesn't follow at all.  I requested that the "rights" being
> referred to should be stated, not handwaved with a term that presumes
> that copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, or many other disparate
> legal areas can be lumped together.
> 
> If PSF holds rights that are covered by *all* those fields of law, I'd
> be very surprised; but if the "rights" are *not* covered by all those
> different legal areas, then the term is useless.

Functionally, though, I think the term intellectual property here
works.  PSF holds (to their knowledge) all intellectual property
associated with Python -- there may be no patents, but with the
statement they assert that either there are no patents or they hold
them.  We also know (implied from other sources) that PSF does not
restrict its intellectual property.  The intent of this statement is
that someone using Python need not worry about "intellectual property"
associated with Python, which includes at least patent, copyright, and
trade secrets.  I don't know how this applies to trademarks, since they
are different from the others, and obviously PSF does not hold every
trademark that contains Python and relates to computers.

> If the PSF holds software patents in Python, I imagine many would be
> outraged.  I don't believe it does.  If it's not the case, why imply it
> with an overbroad term?

I would not be outraged.  If they enforced those patents, then I might
be outraged.

  Ian