Legally speaking

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Legally speaking: is information property?

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Communications of the ACM archive
Volume 34 , Issue 3 (March 1991) table of contents

Pages: 15 - 18

Year of Publication: 1991

ISSN:0001-0782

Author

Pamela Samuelson

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 3, Downloads (12 Months): 26, Citation Count: 2

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ABSTRACT

This column will discuss why the law has traditionally resisted characterizing information as the sort of thing that can be private property, and will speculate about why judges may be more receptive nowadays to assertions that information should be treated as property. This new attitude is illustrated by a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision which upheld criminal convictions based solely on the misappropriation of information which the Court found to be the property of one of the defendants' employers.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	Jefferson, T. Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed., 1854, pp. 180-181.
	2	Samuelson, P. Information As Prop erty: Do Ruckelshaus and Carpenter signal a changing direction in intellectual property law? Catholic University Law Rev. 38 (1989), 365.

CITED BY 2

	Lawrence A. West, Jr., Researching the costs of information systems, Journal of Management Information Systems, v.11 n.2, p.75-107, September 1994
	Richard A. Spinello, Property Rights in Genetic Information, Ethics and Information Technology, v.6 n.1, p.29-42, March 2004