Was thinking of this after a conversation I had on a thread about dreams. Someone joked “I was dreaming of the events of The Matrix, then I was woken up by someone worried my dream was infringing the Wachowski’s copyrights”, and it turned into a whole train of thought in my mind, like violating IP law because you stole fire from Zeus which was his intellectual property.
Discovery of oxygen.
Stop breathing my proprietary gas!
My time zones! Not yours!
My special ï makes all i’s mine or I’ll sue you into bankrupt poverty.
I own slurred accent (n + 1) and anyone speaking in said accent must cease and desist
Planetary air is free as no one could prove in court that they had any hand in its design or creation.
However the air in contained facility such as a space station or mars habitat is copy protected. Each inhabitant requires a Microsoft 365 style license renewed annually to breathe. Special areas of the habitat or use cases such as atheltic activities require special temporary licenses.
Hmmm Brb: writing synopsis.
That’s basically a plot point in Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, where visitors have to pay for the amount of air they intend to breathe while visiting the moon.
Also, Idea: invent a copyrightable method of filtering or otherwise treating air. Release your “specially modified” air into the atmosphere. Start charging for every time someone inhales one of your AyreMolecuulz™.
Ownership of specific light spectrums would be fucked up
I think Anish Kapoor owns Vantablack if that counts. Technically he probably just owns the right to the paint
As much as I dislike Kapoor, technically Vantablack isn’t a pigment or regular paint by any means. From my understanding it is actually carbon nano tubes with who knows what else mixed in it and I believe it’s actually very dangerous to be around without proper PPE. So in that sense, it makes sense to me that he “owns” it.
Still don’t like the guy though.
If it’s patented, you can just read the patent to know what else is in it.
He doesn’t own it. He has an exclusive license to use it in art. Surrey NanoSystems Limited owns the patent on VantaBlack. Stuart Semple was so angry that Kapoor received that license that he had a blacker black material created and licensed it to anyone but Kapoor. When Kapoor obtained a sample anyway, Semple had a still blacker material created, to spite him.
Royalties every time you use a line from a Disney musical in spoken conversation
Lineages could claim copyright of children and their works as derivative. Entire families could claim copyright of their descendants and all works related. Each new generation resets the timer on expiration if the copyright expirations still apply.