IP Jurisprudence

Demystifying Intellectual Property (IP)

Liberation from the bondage of tangible, prowess to present everywhere and anywhere at the same time, endurance to illuminate everyone and everything, zest to demystify any misty, and Midas blessings to generate immense prosperity, provide an envelope to the character of Intellectual Property; simply, IP is Omnipotent, Omnipresent and Omniscient.

The simplest things are the most obscure to define. One of the most accepted definitions of Property states that it is a bundle of rights. Legal Rights are always intangible in nature with the manifestation associated with the tangibles. Tangible do not have rights; people have rights. The right to possess is one of the rights in the bundle of rights collectively known as property. The decision to possess a tangible resides in the utility of the tangible. The utility is associated with knowledge of the tangible. In the acronym IPR, ‘I’ stands for intellectual which is already embedded in the property. ‘R’ stands for rights a bundle of which is nothing but property. Without I and R, IPR is nothing but simply, ‘P’ that stands for the property. However, IP does not have tangibles character like immovable and movable properties do. This is the reason why instead of depreciation, IP passes through amortization.

Property, Liberty, and Freedom

The rights are collectively responsible for branding tangible as property personal rights. The bundle of personal rights, available for discharging at will, constitutes liberty. The correlation between liberty and property is one of the major distinguishing characteristics that differentiate humans from other life forms. The correlation bond between property and liberty is freedom. The strength of the bond between liberty and property defines the quality of freedom. The same view has been enunciated in Lynch v. Household Finance Corp., 405 U.S. 538 (1972) in the following wordings of Justice Potter Stewart:

A fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property. Neither could have meaning without the other. That rights in property are basic civil rights has long been recognized.

“[F]reedom one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.” Justice Cardoza in Pafko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319 (1937)