Profitability of digital innovations depends on the ability of the innovator to prevent imitation and control a bottleneck in the ecosystem. The main drivers of value in the markets for information and communication include the perceived inherent value of the information product or service itself and the size and structure of the network. This chapter focuses on how to protect and enhance the value of information.

The estate at Yasnaya Polyana was both a blessing and a curse to Tolstoy and his wife Sofia. It became the beloved familial, historical stage where the Tolstoys proudly lived and raised their ten children, and Tolstoy wrote his work. It had belonged to his mother, whose great-grandfather Major General Prince Sergei Volkonsky had purchased it in 1763. Tolstoy inherited the property of 330 serfs in 1847, and in 1860, inherited another 300 serfs when his eldest brother died. He had sold half his land and the main house to pay gambling debts by the time he married in 1862. In the next two decades, he managed to re-establish the Tolstoy fortune, investing money earned from the novels in land nearby and in Samara province. By 1880, Tolstoy believed that property ownership was evil. His self-censure reflected his ambitions to acquire property. He had quintupled the value of his holdings to 500,000 rubles by 1891, when the land was divided among his wife and children. After his death, they gave much of Yasnaya Polyana to the peasants, as Tolstoy requested, using the sale of his works to buy out their shares. Tolstoy’s family, literature, and property were everywhere intertwined.

A draft expert manual is provided. The draft manual deals with: definitions; standard-setting practices; patents; copyrights; layout circuits; trade secrets; IP remedies (including injunctions and damages); and competition law.

In this chapter, I argue that the formation of intellectual property was enabled by a cultural transformation, involving the embrace of natural legality, a transformation that parallels, in significant respects, the Christianization of imperial Rome. In this cultural transformation, traditions of Roman law were rediscovered as a naturalistic foundation for sociability and national economic life. The commodification of human creativity and inventive discovery, through intellectual property rights, made sense, within the culture of natural legality, as a justified response to natural, but extraordinary, powers of human creativity, and became part of a broader strategy for national empowerment. The combination of Roman law with interpretations of Christian obligation that emphasized natural sociability and legality gave new form to a natural rights tradition, one that providing legitimating foundations for the recognition of intellectual property under principles of English common law. The chapter concludes with a focus on the U.S. constitutional convention of 1787, and the embrace of intellectual property as part of the constitutional framework for a powerful, national state.

This chapter examines how certain other forms of intangible assets, namely: patents, copyright, registered trade marks; and the benefit arising under a policy of life assurance, or a marine policy, may be dealt with by means of statutes specifically tailored for such assets. It compares the operation of such statutes to the operation of Law of Property Agt 1925, section 136(1).