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We went over a handout [PDF|PS|TeX] and discussed intellectual property. I concentrated for perhaps half the period on the questions "What are patent, copyright, trade mark, and trade secret?" (with concrete examples of each) and "What is copyright and what is intellectual property which could be subject to copyright?". In patents, I prominently mentioned: one-click (amazon), reverse auctions (priceline). I emphasized that maybe the validity of certain patents is not clear, and that sometimes the borderline between intellectual property which could be protected by patents and by other means is not clear.

I further discussed music, texts (Project Gutenberg, and mention of e-books as a possible natural element in the sequence "mud tablets --> papyrus --> scrolls ---> books --> ?"), pictures/cartoons: I mentioned corbis whose owner, Bill Gates, recently cited two major problems: bandwidth and copyright. Corbis currently has approximately 65 million images, including pictures from many museums and, for example, the classic photographs of Ansel Adams. Cartoonbank has the New Yorker cartoons, probably the largest collection of magazine cartoons in the country. These are all "protected" in some way.

We briefly discussed copying CD's. To some extent we also discussed education and biological information. I may have mentioned the phrase, "information imperialism". I declared, ``I am a content provider'' since education is also intellectual property (especially as distance learning becomes more of a reality).

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