Intellectual Property

Well...there’s real property and the things that live on it. Cows. Barn. Fertilizer (Congresspeople were just visiting.) Surgical face masks.

But what about the blueprints for a state-of-the-art, brand-new semiconductor. Awesome device. Can store the entire video library of Netflix on your wrist. Took a thousand people 4 years to build the blueprints, and they’re probably worth half a billion dollars. Think of them as brain-splat...the good kind, not the zombie-eaten kind.

The best ideas, splattered on paper, and then filed with the US and other patent offices, likely to be licensed in return for cash payments to a variety of computer device makers over time.

This paper? It’s intellectual property. Or rather...the ideas represented on it are IP...and they’re sellable, just like any other property: Cars, horses, homes, land, planes, remote control gardening shears...whatever.

Intellectual property generally refers to anything that’s not, like…touchable. MC Hammer knows what we’re talking about. Just ideas or assets that only live as concepts.

The Disney brand? Intellectual property.

The Disney theme park? Real property.

The recipe for Coke? Intellectual property.

That bottle of coke Safeway sold you for 3 bucks? Real property.

The Shmoop name and logo, and the “Shmoop!” audio sound thingy? Intellectual property.

A Shmoop t-shirt? Real property.

The kid who stars in all our Shmoop videos? Uh…not property. There are...laws against that sort of thing today.