One of the greatest tragedies of intellectual property law is how it generates intellectual confusion among successful businesspeople. Many are under the impression, even when it is not true, that they owe their wealth to copyrights, trademarks, and patents and not necessarily to their business savvy.

For this reason, they defend intellectual property as if it were the very lifeblood of their business operations. They fail to give primary credit where it is due: to their own ingenuity, willingness to take a risk, and their market-based activities generally. This is often an empirically incorrect judgment on their part, and it carries with it the tragedy of crediting the state for the accomplishments that are actually due to their own entrepreneurial activities.

" It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not arise by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it.

Novell still uses software patents protection as a business proposition to users of SUSE

There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers.

[Steve] Gibson, who early in the conversation makes it clear he believes in trademarks and copyrights and intellectual property -- although he sees software patents have become a problem -- and has even applied for patents when he's done consulting work, explains how patents get written and then stretched like taffy to be broader and stupider, and then he talks about his reaction to Microsoft's cl

While trademarks are often lumped together with copyrights and patents—under the poorly termed "intellectual property" umbrella—trademarks are quite different. One of those differences is that a trademark must be actively enforced, at least under US law, or the mark holder risks losing it.

"Tthorough discussion of enclosure must consider the international institutions that impose it. The International Monetary Fund is a well-known example; its "rescue" agreements attack the intellectual commons through "user fees" for public school, which prevent millions of poor children from attending.

Novell has moved to quell growing concerns that it has sold Linux out to Microsoft as part of its Attachmate deal. On Wednesday, Novell chief marketing officer John Dragoon issued a short statement saying that Novell – not Microsoft – owns the copyrights on Unix.

In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.” My response was simple.