We refer to patents, trademarks and copyrights as "intellectual property" in part because they have attributes of what we normally think of as tangible property. Just as ownership of tangible property – a piece of land or a bicycle – allows us to say who can and can’t use our property, but doesn’t necessarily allow us to use our own property in all situations (e.g. in most places you need a license to drive a car, even if you own it), so too IP rights provide us with a say over who can use our IP, even if IP ownership doesn’t guarantee us the right to use our own IP (e.g. sometimes it’s necessary to cross-license with another IP owner).
Additionally, we can dispose of IP rights like we do tangible property: we can transfer ownership to others, we can pass on IP rights to our inheritors, or we can forego our rights and dedicate our IP to the public (in the case of IP, prior to the date on which those rights would otherwise have expired).
Dedication to the public is probably most commonly encountered in the context of US patent prosecution, which sometimes requires an applicant to disclaim the term of a to-be-granted patent beyond a certain date and to promise that that to-be-granted patent will be co-owned with an earlier-granted patent in order to be enforceable, in order to secure grant of the later patent. (We’ve discussed this in previous blog posts, e.g. here and here.) That is at its heart a form of dedication to the public, or can be viewed as such.
Less commonly, an author will dedicate his writings to the public. Recently, Tom Lehrer announced that that’s what he’s doing with his corpus of songs and, to the extent he can, the music he wrote for those songs. Actually, since US copyright law doesn’t have a dedication-to-the-public provision, technically what he did was to grant an irrevocable, royalty-free license to all comers to use his words and music, but the end result is the same. We sometimes see this in the patent sphere; a covenant not to sue can also achieve the same end.
If you’re reading this blog and you don’t know who Tom Lehrer is, he was trained as a mathematician, but he gained fame in writing and performing satirical songs on topics of the day in the 1950’s and 1960’s. His classic “I got it from Agnes”, for example, seems rather appropriate in this era of the Wuhan virus and “contact tracing”. As an Eagle Scout and a chemist, two of my personal favorites are “Be Prepared” and “The Elements Song”, respectively.
In any event, Mr. Lehrer is still alive and now in his 90’s, and has made his lyrics and much of his music available here.