PUBLIC MARKS with tag droitscopie

In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoku’s intellectual property rights let the game’s popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says. Nikoli does not plan to trademark other new games, either, in hopes this will also help them take off. “This openness is more in keeping with Nikoli’s open culture,” said Mr. Kaji, who sat on a sofa in his Tokyo office among pillows adorned with printed faces of racehorses. “We’re prolific because we do it for the love of games, not for the money.”

The management of digital rights, as opposed to their enforcement, is a real problem in the publishing industry, but discussion is usually drowned out by the shouting matches about digital rights enforcement. Here's a typical use case: an editor wants to take an article with six pictures from her magazine's print edition and put it online. Two of the pictures come from a cookbook being reviewed by the article, two were shot for the article by a freelancer, and two come from a stock photo house. Which images can the editor use in the online version?

Fundamentally, the stuff we call "intellectual property" is just knowledge - ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets, databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into its development to realise that value.