Legal Challenges to Future Information Businesses

ideas, facts, knowledge, wisdom No legal rights Ideas reduced to practice Possibly patents, trade secrets, etc. Information Expression of ideas, creativity, etc. Possibly copyright, trademarks, trade secrets, etc. Data Representation e.g. in binary form No legal rights, but possibly technical protection, e.g. encryption Physical medium Embodiment Possibly property rights, technical protection Figure 2. Levels of abstraction related to intangible objects and their protection Technical protection measures cover data, but not information, and legal rights respectively do not apply to data. In principle, an entity could technically protect any data that is in its possession. On the other hand, legal rights cover only information that lawmakers have considered worth protecting. However, legal protection does not necessarily require the physical possess of the information. That is, although technical and legal protection measures often cover same intangible objects, in principle, their coverage is quite distinct. More information on intellectual property rights can be found – for example – in the works of GOLDSTEIN [e.g. 37], LEMLEY, MENELL, MERGES, and SAMUELSON [e.g. 69, 76] in America; BAINBRIDGE [9, 10], HUGENHOLTZ [e.g. 48, 49, 50], JACOB