Over the last few years, with the SCO lawsuits, and also with Microsoft’s spokespersons, there has been an attempt at inserting a catchphrase into business and internet nomenclature;

Intellectual Property

People like Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Darl McBride of SCO, for example, have been repeatedly pushing this catchphrase at the world for a long time now, usually within the context that there are patents, copyrights, ideas, and innovations which they own, and usually implying that Linux and Open Source programs in general infringe on their “Intellectual Property rights”.

The most recent of these attempts at creating FUD was perpetrated by Steve Ballmer at a company event in the UK last week, in which he states

“People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us”

Other choice quotes from Mr Ballmer;

“There are plenty of other people who may also have intellectual property. And every time an Eolas comes to Microsoft and says, “Pay us,” I suspect they also would like to eventually go to the open source world. So getting what I’ll call an intellectual property interoperability framework between the two worlds I think is important.”

Two mentions of “intellectual property” in that one quote!

So, what does this catchphrase actually mean, and why are these companies pushing it so strongly, with threats of lawsuits, enforcement of their “rights”, and the rest?


The answer is, that there is no such legal entity as “Intellectual Property” - there is no law that I know of anywhere which creates an entity under the specific heading of that name. “Thou shalt not infringe on another’s Intellectual Property”… or laws to that effect - don’t exist. Anywhere. Someone please correct me on this and point out a statute in the U.S.A. or the U.K for example, which creates such a thing.

What does exist though, are laws protecting the following list;

Patents

Trademarks

Copyrights

Trade Secrets

Service Marks

Do you see “Intellectual Property” in that list? No, neither do I. So why are they using it?

My opinion is that they’re trying to create a bogeyman. This particular bogeyman is big and scary and he’s called Intellectual Property, and eventually he’s coming to Get You. He’s not going to say precisely HOW he’s going to get you - because that would give the game away, and could provide you with time to prepare defences and even take away some of his Super Bogeyman Powers with which he uses to scare you.

Another reason, I think, for the use of such a catchphrase, is it’s precisely because it has no real meaning other than implication and insinuation. Companies and customers who use computers, servers, and various operating systems will invariably hear and read reports of what people like Mr Ballmer are saying, and infer lots of meaning into their use of that catchphrase. Especially reading or hearing things like “Linux infringes on our IP and we want people to start paying for it!” It’s designed to create Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about GNU/Linux, and other Open Source software like OpenOffice for example.

Could they, also, wish to lobby for some creation of “Intellectual Property” as some kind of vague all encompassing legal entity? If you want to create a law which suits your needs, creating a catchphrase for it and getting it into the mindset of the people is an effective start towards that goal. Perhaps we’ll see Microsoft lobbying the American Congress for the creation of an “Intellectual Property Law” in the future. Microsoft are well known to lobby, cajole, and pressure politicians and other people to get their way.

So when Steve Ballmer says things like

” So getting what I’ll call an intellectual property interoperability framework between the two worlds I think is important.”

- the two worlds being Microsoft’s closed source world, and the open source world - that sentence is in fact meaningless. Important for who, precisely? Microsoft of course, because they are scared. They are scared that they are not being feared any more. They are scared that they are becoming irrelevant to today’s world, and they cannot cope with that thought, because they really, really cannot change the way they see the world. They can’t buy out, or assimilate Open Source, because Open Source isn’t a company, and they’re having a very, very rough time dealing with that. So their only real option - in their eyes, because they want to dominate the IT world - is to attempt to stomp on the seemingly unstoppable progress of Open Source by creating Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in the minds of the users - both potential and actual - of Open Source software.

The trouble with that plan, is that people are not as stupid as Microsoft (or SCO), assume. Poor them.