IP Gambit Ploys

Aug 23, 2012

Given that all my work products are inteclletual property, I always pay a great deal of attention to matters of copyright, moral rights, patents and so forth in documents that I sign, particularly including contracts. Documents that I am asked to sign always assert ownership rights tilted unreasonably towards the author of the agreement - that is, whoever paid the lawyers. Lawyers seem to be competing with each other to claim ever more complete ownership of the IP in any material. (I always negotiate them back to reasonableness, and generally people are happy to do this).

Today, I’ve seen a new high (or low): I’ve been asked to sign a document that cedes all the IP (copyright, moral rights, patents, registered trade marks etc) in a document I’m surprised to write to a third party, specifically including incorporated materials. And this document is supposed to be a report on current state of [something] (if I named it, I’d be naming the guilty party). A report like this can’t be written without extensively quoting other sources (fair use).

There’s no way that I can sign agreements like this - this IP is not mine to transfer ownership of. And the lawyer who wrote it must know this too - so why write this?

I can only think that this is yet another sign of a coming collapse in IP arrangements. Patent, Copyright, etc: now that the technology of sharing information has moved along so far, these existing arrangements are not serving us anymore.