Cory Doctorow from BoingBoing has recently discussed the case of Landmark Digital Services (Creators of “Shazam”, an audio fingerprinting tool) threatening a guy who was discussing how to implement an audio-fingerprinting algorithm. To make a long story short, Landmark Digital Services (“Shazam”), accused Roy van Rjin of infringing on their patents by discussing how audio-fingerprinting worked, and is trying to force him to put his blog post down. Go read the above links for more detail.

This is not only a jerk move from the part of Shazam, but it is also a very sad example of how companies use the murky idea of “IP” (Intellectual Property) to try and enforce rights that they DO NOT HAVE.

Recently “Intellectual Property” has been used to put together three very different kinds of laws, whose only thing in common is that they deal with ideas: Copyright Law, Patent Law and Trademark Law. Put very simply, Copyright law describes who has the right to copy a creative work; Patent law describes who has the right to implement and use a certain technical idea; and Trademark Law describes who has the right to use a Brand on a certain service or product.

Now, these laws give very different rights and duties, for very different situations. For example, patent law, which is described here, says that if you have a technical idea (like, how to make a machine), you can give the government a very detailed description of how your idea works, and the government will give you a monopoly of the use of your idea in exchange of explaining to everyone how your idea works. It makes sense, if the working of your patent is not public, how will someone know if they are infringing it or not?

Copyright is almost the opposite – you register your copyright work with the government, and you get a monopoly on copying/distributing your work, in exchange of letting everyone copy/distribute your work for free after a certain time has passed. (And big media companies are trying to cheat us and extend this time indefinitely, but that is another discussion).

Now, what happened in the case of Landmark Digital Services/Shazam is that they are trying to enforce “copyright” rights into their patents. “We have a patent on this idea, so you can’t discuss this idea, or show this idea to anyone!”. If they were alleging that copyright rights were infringed, they would have a case, but the whole point of patents is that everyone is supposed to know, discuss and understand how the given patent work. You can only infringe a patent if you are actually using the patented idea, not talking about it.

This is what happen when we put together all these laws under the same term. We start to think of them as the same. And unethical people will try to rob us of our rights by using this confusion.

* Some more discussion about why “Intellectual Property” should not be used can be seen here.