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Intellectual Property: A Definition |
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Intellectual property, very generally, relates to the output, which result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Traditionally intellectual property is divided into two branches:
1) Industrial Property
a)  Inventions
b) Marks (trademarks and service marks)
c) Industrial designs
d) Unfair competition (trade secrets)
e) Geographical indications (indications of source and appellations of origin)
2) Copyright
The protection of intellectual property is guaranteed through a variety of laws, which grant the creators of intellectual goods, and services certain time-limited rights to control the use made of their products. Those rights apply to the intellectual creation as such, and not to the physical object in which the work may be embodied.
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Gutenberg's printing press, 1455
Gutenberg's printing press, an innovative aggregation of inventions known for centuries before Gutenberg: the olive oil press, oil-based ink, block-print technology, and movable types, allowed the mass production of the movable type used to reproduce a page of text and increased the production rate enormously. During the Middle Ages monks took at least a year over making a handwriting copy of a book. Gutenberg printed about 300 sheets per day. Because parchment was too costly for mass production - often for the production of one copy of a medieval book a whole flock of sheep was used - it was substituted by cheap paper made from recycled clothing left over from the massive number of dead caused by the Great Plague.
Within forty-five years, in 1500, already ten million copies were available for a few hundred thousand literate. Because individuals could examine a range of opinions now, the printed Bible, especially after having been translated into German by Martin Luther, and increasing literacy added to the subversion of clerical authorities. The interest in books increased with the rise of vernacular, non-Latin literary texts, beginning with Dante's Divine Comedy, the first literary text written in Italian.
Among others, the improvement of the distribution and the production of books and increased literacy made the development of print mass media possible.
Michael Giesecke (Sinnenwandel Sprachwandel Kulturwandel. Studien zur Vorgeschichte der Informationsgesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992) has shown that due to a division of labor among authors, printers and typesetters Gutenberg's invention increasingly led to a standardization of - written and unwritten - language in form of orthography, grammar and signs. To communicate one's ideas became linked to the use of a kind of code, and reading became a kind of rite of passage, in every human's life an important step towards independency.
With the increasing linkage of knowledge to wide reading and learnedness, the history of knowledge becomes the history of readings, of readings dependent on chance and on circumstance.
For further details see:
Martin Warnke, Text und Technik,  http://www.uni-lueneburg.de/
Bruce Jones, Manuscripts, Books, and Maps: The Printing Press and a Changing World, http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Books/booktext.html
 http://www.uni-lueneburg.de/
http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Books/bo...
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