Intellectual property offences

For several hundred years, unauthorized uses of someone else’s intellectual works have received labels associating such actions – interferences with state-granted monopolies – with committing a crime: from plagiarism, via piracy and theft, to modern associations with organ-ized crime and (financing) terrorism. Those who own and control the exclusivity which intellectual property (IP) confers have been quite creative in labelling unauthorized uses as an ethical and moral wrong. The term plagiarism, for example, originates from the Latin word plagiarius, meaning ‘kidnapper, seducer, plunderer, one who kidnaps the child or slave of another’,¹ and was pioneered by the poet Marcus Valerius Martialis (Martial), who worked and published in Rome in the first century AD.² Martial apparently complained that another poet had ‘kidnapped’ his verses to denote someone stealing his work, appropriating it without due recognition to him as author: a literary thief who kidnaps someone else’s words. About 1,500 years later, in the seventeenth century, the term was used in this way in English by dramatist Ben Jonson, to describe as a ‘plagiary’ someone guilty of literary theft.³