Recently there have been trmendous increase in ppl using the words copyright and patent. So i thought it might be necessary to educate them as to what it means....
copyright would prevent someone from copying the material form of expression of an idea, but could not stop them from expressing the same idea in a different form, nor from using the same form of expression if they had no knowledge of the original held by the copyright holder.
Any intellectual property rights such as copyright, patents, etc, are granted for "inventions" (something new invented which was not their in existence before the act of such person) and not on "discoveries" (something which was there in existence but unknown to public). Thus u can get a patent for creating a new type of light bulb which runs on brain cells of a person, but u cant get patent for discovering that moon is just few kms away.
The first codification of intellectual property can be traced to the Jewish laws codified in the Talmud, which declared a prohibition against "Gnevat ha daat", literally the theft of ideas. The type of ideas subject to theft and further explanation may be found in the Shulkhan Arukh. Both texts precede the Statute of Anne by a few hundred years.
With the French Revolution, which followed the American Revolution, there was debate in Europe over the nature of protection for copyright and patents; those who supported unlimited copyrights frequently used the term property to advance that agenda, while others who supported a more limited system sometimes used the term intellectual rights (droits intellectuels).
The system currently used by much of the Western world is more in line with the second view, with limited copyrights that eventually expire.
