Principles of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is the body of law that serves to protect creations that are "intangible or ‘intellectual’ in nature" (Harris, 1995, p. 6). This is somewhat of a misnomer as this protection is limited to the expression of an idea rather than to the idea itself; the creation must be in a fixed or tangible form to secure protection. Digital or electronic creations are in a virtual or intangible form, thus, it is problematic to secure this protection.

The term intellectual property is often interpreted to mean copyright and its neighboring performance, production, and broadcast rights. The issues at hand will focus primarily on the intellectual property concept of copyright. The purpose of copyright law is to "promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts" (Mean, 1995, p. 2). Creations or works in both the cultural and information technology industries are granted automatic copyright protection provided that the work is original, fixed in form, and created or published by either a Canadian citizen, British subject, or a citizen or subject of a Berne Convention country. Through copyright legislation, the creator is given specific rights and is protected from the infringement of these rights. This protection lasts for the life of the creator plus 50 years thereafter (Harris, 1995). Copyright is effective even in the absence of a copyright © symbol.

The Canadian Copyright Act (1) maintains the economic rights and the integrity or moral rights of a creator. Economic rights include, but are not limited to, rights of reproduction, public performance, publication, adaptation, exhibition, and the right to authorize any of these rights. Moral rights, dealing with the rights of paternity, integrity, and association, are summarized by Mean (1995, p. 3) as follows:

The right of integrity; that is the right to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification which might be prejudicial to the artist’s honour or reputation,
The right of attribution; that is, the right to claim authorship of a work,
The right to decide when a work will be published, and
The right to withdraw a work from publication.

The traditional boundaries of copyright are being challenged by new emerging technologies, namely digital technology, which is electronically coded and machine readable in form. This new technology is the basis of the Internet, and it is changing our understandings of intellectual property and launching new concerns into cyberspace.

(1)The Canadian Copyright Act that is referred to throughout this paper is an unofficial and consolidated version that is found in Canadian Copyright Law (Harris, 1995).