Patent monetization entity

See troll.

Crowded field

Identified by the (EU) General Court in the radiator cases (T 83/11 and T 84/11), although there is no English judgment and the French judgment refers to "une saturation de l’état de l’art", as a factor that influences the perception of a design by the informed user. If the design field is saturated, the informed user is likely to be sensitive to smaller differences between designs. See also prior art density.

Prior art density

A measure of how much activity there has been in a particular design field, against which the novelty and individual character of a design must be judged. An expression encountered in the context of the EU registered design system. See crowded field.

Duplitecture

At best, architectural mimicry: at worst, blatant infringement of architects' copyright. There has been a rash of instances of duplitecture in China in recent years: in January 2013 The Guardian reported on a building being erected in Chongqing that bore an uncanny resemblance to a building (or actually three buildings) being built near Shanghai, the work of Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British "starchitect".

The Guardian - the article is by Oliver Wainwright - sets this latest bit of copying in the context of other Chinese copies, including Hallstatt, a village in Austria (and a UNESCO World Heritage Site), Dorchester (the Dorset one), and the Eiffel Tower. Another interesting commentary on the phenomenon is to be found in Foreign Policy, by Jack Carlson, here (a few months old, and not covering the Hadid work). It's also reported in Spiegel, and the Art and Artifice blog has the story too.

Hadid memorably says of the line between copying and taking inspiration: "It is fine to take from the same well – but not from the same bucket."

Teleologic beauty or value

The beauty or value of something which derives from the way it performs its function. Design protection has usually concentrated on matters of eye-appeal, though this is no longer a requirement for protection in the UK or EU systems: such a requirement may exclude designs in which form and function merge, and which according to some approaches to design philosophy merit protection precisely because of what may be referred to as their teleologic beauty.

The OED cites two connected references, one for each variant on the expression although the second might be an error by John Stuart Mill: De Quincey in Blackwood's Magazine, volume 52 page 730/2 (1842) ("The peculiar beauty of a kitchen-garden, or of a machine, which must be derived from their tendency to certain ends or uses, is called teleologic beauty") and Mill in Principles of Political Economy (1876) iii. i. §2 264 (1848) ("Value in use, or as Mr. De Quincey calls it, teleologic value, is the extreme limit of value in exchange").

Intellectual property

The definition of intellectual property in my Dictionary is one of those of which I am most pleased. It would have been improved by reference to this piece published on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website, or to this posting by Eric Goldman on his Technology and Marketing Law blog. Mr Goldman argues that the expression "soft IP" is so imprecise, and its concomitant expression "hard IP" likewise, that it would be best if we just stopped talking about IP altogether. Hear, hear.

My impression, for what it is worth, is that "hard IP" is that IP that results in solid physical objects, made of metal and covered in oil - so, patents and designs but not copyright and trade marks: but of course patents can cover soft stuff, like computer programs (but not, of course, as such, not here anyway) and copyright used to protect hard stuff like exhaust pipes. Mr Goldman doesn't seem to have set up his blog for comments, so this will have to suffice.

Having started on an interesting digression (much more interesting than the agreement for a lease that is lying on my desk, metaphorically thumbing its nose at me, ridiculing my scant knowledge of commercial property law) I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, which gave as the earliest use of the expression "intellectual property" a quote from volume 41 of The Monthly Review, as long ago as 1769:

What a niggard this Doctor is of his own, and how profuse he is of other people's intellectual property.

Although that exercise in mass trespass (because it so manifestly fails to respect copyright where it subsists), Google Books, offers several complete scanned volumes of The Monthly Review, it does not have volume 41, on page 290 of which the extract appears. More research will be needed if I am to work out that that Doctor did, and indeed who he was, and why he should be described as a "niggard", a word which presumably has fallen into disuse because of its similarity to another word that no civilised person would now utter.

Patent Assertion Entity

A polite euphemism for patent troll (q.v.).