#69 Intellectual Property

Mark Griffin (0:04)

Hi, and welcome to another edition of the Construx Inspect and Adapt podcast. I'm your host, Mark Griffin, Director of Customer Solutions here at Construx.

We're a team of software engineering experts founded by legendary author, Steve McConnell. Here at Construx, we believe every software team can be more successful at delivering higher levels of business value.

Today, we're going to talk about something a little outside of the practices space which we normally inspect and adapt. We've been wanting to scratch an itch around a topic that may not be so readily apparent in software professionals' life, and that is intellectual property law. This podcast is an attempt to fill a gap in the software professionals' knowledge base to provide a basic understanding of IP law that helps a person better understand their own IP, their organization's IP, and also other IPs that any professional might come in contact with. Basically, who's allowed and how do you control the use of IP? So Construx principal consultant, Steve Tockey, joined senior fellow Earl Beede and I to dig into this topic and go down the rabbit hole quite quickly. So let's listen in.

Earl Beede (1:01)

Well, it's not so much lawyers, but things that lawyers get called in to talk about a lot because we have this idea that this is knowledge work and knowledge work is full of things that we want to say, hey, that was my idea. And you can't just take it and make a lot of money off my idea. That's been around for a while. And so there's a whole bunch of law that lawyers have come out trying to protect this idea of there's property in an idea.

Like there's real estate, there's property in an idea that you can own, and then you can decide what you want to do with it. And so there's these laws that they established called intellectual property.

Mark Griffin (1:38)

Very nice. Very calmly said, Earl. I like that.

Steve Tockey (1:41)

Yeah.

Mark Griffin (1:42)

We have to caveat this thing. We are not lawyers.

Steve Tockey (1:44)

Absolutely not.

Mark Griffin (1:45)

We get involved occasionally with things. So this is really a non-lawyer view of property, international property law.

Steve Tockey (1:53)

The statement is this is for educational and entertainment purposes only.

Mark Griffin (1:58)

Do not take this to the bank. Do not bet on the various betting platforms about what we're saying.

Earl Beede (2:04)

But it's well-informed entertainment and educational purposes.

Mark Griffin (2:09)

I would agree with that. All right, Steve, tell us what we're going to talk about today.

Steve Tockey (2:15)

Keep in mind that there are differences in different countries.

We are taking a U.S.-centric view here. Some of this may not apply outside of the US., but in general, at the top level, there is agreement through most of the world.

Mark Griffin (2:34)

Okay.

Steve Tockey (2:35)

While this is not, I mean, typically the Inspect and Adapt is really about some practice, estimation or requirements. So this really isn't a practice in the traditional sense, but what we're trying to do here is fill a gap in many software professionals' understanding of what really is a quite important topic as a professional. You're working with intellectual property, both your own, your organization's own, and other organizations' intellectual property. And you really have to know how to handle it correctly, because if you don't, you either lose things that are important to you, or set yourself up for being sued. Talk a little bit about the history. I mean, as Earl was saying, intellectual property, I mean, yeah, it's like owning a house. It's just ownership of knowledge or expression. And to start things off, most people do have a pretty dim view of the idea of a monopoly.

Monopolies in general are regarded as not good things. But it actually turns out that intellectual property is a kind of monopoly. It's a form of monopoly, but it's fairly limited. And that's kind of what makes it tenable. Intellectual property law is around the idea of who, if anyone, is allowed to control the use. Of some particular intellectual property.

Interestingly, 250 years ago, almost on the dot, so pre-American Revolution 1776, all of IP law was controlled in the UK and here in the colonies.

It was controlled by the English Crown, whoever was king at the time, who would then grant control over virtually any kind of intellectual property, in the sense of who could manufacture certain products, who could publish certain books, who could, I mean, anything that involved any kind of intellectual property, it was up to the king or queen to decide who they were gonna allow to do that for virtually anything, as I said, and for as long as that person or company stayed in favor, which really amounted to little more than crony capitalism when it comes down to that. Which the colonists obviously viewed as A, unfair and B, subject to corruption. And so underneath a lot of US intellectual property law is a motivation for fairness and anti-corruption.