The well known laws of intellectual properties (patents, copyright, trademarks and industrial design) and other allied rights in the form or substance of information (confidentiality) face a measure of shake-up resulting from advance of information technology.
The principal impact on all types of intellectual property (IP), particularly on those relating to forms and texture (copyright, trademarks and industrial designs) originates from the ‘dematerialization’ of information or ‘decoupling’ from the material substructure that the information used to subsist or to be deposited in.
Although the protection granted under intellectual property has always been distinctly earmark for the information or ‘expression’ rather than the material medium embodying such information or used for the expression, the possibility offered by information technology to de-link completely the information from the material background, indeed to make electronic impulses the new of expression, has thrown some long standing conceptions into chaos.
The proliferation of the new medium of creativity, namely the use of digitization, has thus reopened long solved issues of copyright requirement of subsistence, originality and fixation.
Even while these issues are being tackled, the capability provided by digitization and the communication technologies, including the Internet, to transmit data and information to virtually any spot on the globe and transform them into anything at all has shaken up the protection and enforcement mechanisms develop over the centuries.
Where earlier work in the ordinary that is non-electronic, media becomes digitized, the possibility of manipulating the latter and transferring it into something similar rips apart the protection given under law to specific forms.
While the translation or adaptation of nay work is covered under the copyright belonging to the original author, the complete transformation possible through digitization confounds the application of those legal principles.
Obviously, prohibiting any tampering with the digitals format will not work nor make sense as the consequence would be to grant unlimited monopoly rights over bits and bytes which are the common stock available in any digital medium.
Intellectual Property
