Talk:Industrial property

[June 2006]

As problems concerning industrial property are currently gaining importance, partly due to the phenomenon known as globalization, I believe that the stub is in great need of expansion. This expansion process should also include a revamp of articles concerning several related issues, including, but not limited to, intellectual property and unfair competition. Certain items currently discussed in these articles should be moved to the industrial property article, or, at the very least, should include a reference to it. The redirect from unfair competition to anti-trust should be reconsidered. As to the stub, I propose a modification of the currently displayed definition of industrial property in several ways. Trademarks, patents and designs are not intellectual property rights, as the current definition suggests. This can be verified by reading the referenced articles on these ics. Also, industrial property is not limited to these three items, but includes certain aspects of unfair competition, technology and know-how transfer, trade secrets, as well as industrial espionage.--VLH 00:41, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Reverting redirect (discussion moved from User talk:Edcolins)

Hi Ed, I reverted your redirect for the Industrial property article, I think there has been a miss-understanding along the way of the relationship between industrial property and intellectual property. Basically Intellectual property includes both industrial property and copyright, I'll work on the intellectual property article to reflect this better. This European Parliament document provides a nice overview at the top. I will ask the people I know at WIPO for some good reference materials to help. Best, --John Cummings (talk) 22:13, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

John, thanks for your message. I agree that basically intellectual property seems to include both industrial property and, in addition, copyright, as you wrote. This means that there is clearly a large overlap between both topics. I would therefore suggest keeping a single article per WP:OVERLAP ("Overlap: There are two or more pages on related subjects that have a large overlap"). The term "intellectual property" is nowadays (much) more common, whereas the term "industrial property" sounds dated. Why not simply explaining in the article "intellectual property" the meaning and origin of the term "industrial property"? There is already one sentence, i.e.: "The term "industrial property" is sometimes used to refer to a large subset of intellectual property rights including patents, trademarks, industrial designs, utility models, service marks, trade names, and geographical indications." What do you think? --Edcolins (talk) 20:24, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

By the way, having a redirect was also the outcome of this debate: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Industrial property. I would suggest sticking to this conclusion. No reason to override it, IMHO. --Edcolins (talk) 20:40, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Hi @Edcolins:

Thanks very much for your message. I don't think that merging is suitable here for the following reasons:

Industrial property is not an equivalent term to intellectual property, its a subset: I don't think that WP:OVERLAP applies very well because industrial property is a subset of Intellectual property rather than an equivalent term, the example used is two names for the same thing something that redirects and Wikidata deals with. The nearest equivalent of a subset I can see is that industrial property is like the Taxonomic rank of Genus, in between Family and Species . Another would be there are articles for individual series of TV shows as well as articles for the TV show and individual episodes.

There's an article for copyright, the other subset of intellectual property: If Industrial property was merged into Intellectual property it would mean that one of the two subsets of intellectual property didn't have an article, where as the other, Copyright, did. I think it is very unlikely that we would get very far suggesting that the article for copyright was merged into the intellectual property article.

Its a commonly used term : Even if industrial property sounds dated it has a distinct meaning which is used in legal texts e.g the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, I'd also suggest if WIPO are still using it in the names of publications then its still a term in common use (also see the 7 million results in Google search. Additionally 60 people a day are reading the article, this suggests to me that it is topic being searched for by people.

My suggestion for an alternative course of action is for me to work on the first paragraph of the intellectual property article to make these subsets clear and to also ask my contacts at WIPO to read the articles for intellectual property, industrial property and copyright to suggest any missing information.

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 14:20, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your explanations, but I am not convinced by your arguments. In my humble opinion, the overlap is large, even if the terms "intellectual property" and "industrial property" are not equivalent. That copyright has its own article is of little relevance to decide whether "industrial property" should have its own article. In addition, that the term is commonly used is also of little relevance, because Wikipedia is not a dictionary. The article was deleted (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Industrial property). If you want to revive the article, please take this matter through a deletion review process. See WP:DRV. The instructions are here: WP:DELREVD. Thanks. --Edcolins (talk) 21:08, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Coming from the redirect to this convo. These two articles seem entirely distinct, and IMO a redirect to the article about the broad topic of IP just isn't a sufficient substitute for an article about a specific type of IP. As John Cummings has added above, it has 7 million results in a Google search, and is clearly a real thing to people involved in a range of industries, and a lot of people are reading the article as well.

As I assume none of us here are IP specialists, we are familiar with the subset of IP that is copyright because it more commonly affects our daily lives (and our work here), we are not familiar with Industrial Property because it applies go areas that don't affect our lives so much, but I don't think this makes it any less real or less worthy of explanation.

As an example, I am not a medical professional and I personally am unfamiliar with the Off-pump coronary artery bypass, but I don't think that's a good reason to delete the page and redirect it to its parent topic of Coronary artery bypass surgery or even Cardiac surgery. I assume good faith, and also a degree of expertise in the curation of these articles, I know medical professionals were involved in their creation and I trust their judgement to not spam us with extraneous pages. Similarly, I know that the Industrial Property article was written with consultation and support from the World Intellectual Property Organization and I am inclined to defer to their understanding of IP over yours or mine.

I propose that some distinctions are made in the lede between IP and Industrial Property, and that we stop redirecting this article to the wrong place. If you feel strongly enough that it shouldn't though, suggest take it to AFD. Thanks. Battleofalma (talk) 10:50, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion @Battleofalma:, I've now added the distinction between Industrial property and Copyright to the lede of Intellectual property as suggested with references from the EU and WIPO. I found this WIPO publication Understanding copyright and related rights (p4) helpful in making the distinction. @Edcolins: I will make the article visible again and if as outlined at Wikipedia:BLANKANDREDIRECT you feel like this is still an issue please let me know and I can start and Request for Comment. Your suggestion to go through deletion review won't work as the article I would be asking to be undeleted is not the same article, it also wasn't deleted for being non notable. I'm also going to ask my contact at WIPO who is a copyright lawyer to take a look at all three articles and make suggestions for clarifications and improvements.

John Cummings (talk) 11:45, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Hello all, it might help to distinguish between the United States and Europe here:

• In the United States, "intellectual property" is broken up into three categories: patent, trademark, and copyright. "Industrial property" is used in reference to real estate.
• In Europe (and perhaps elsewhere), "intellectual property" is broken up into two categories: "industrial property," which includes patent and trademark, and copyright. Sources: [1] [2]

I'm getting 9 million Google hits for "industrial property," but most seem to be for the US real estate category industrial property. When I google "industrial property" and "intellectual property" together, I get 2 million hits. I'm googling from the US, though. Levivich (talk) 23:59, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

@John Cummings: While I don't mind keeping the article, I think it would make sense to make it shorter, to avoid the enormous redundancy with the material in the article "intellectual property". The sections entitled "Patents for Invention", etc. (all supported by the same, single source) could simply refer to those contained in this section: Intellectual property#Intellectual property rights. The term "intellectual property" appears to used about 30 to 70 times more than the term "industrial property" when combined with the term "patent" or "trademark" (compare "industrial property" patent": 1.900.000 results vs "intellectual property" patent: 74.700.000 results; and "industrial property" trademark": 1.740.000 results vs "intellectual property" trademark: 132.000.000 results). (Associating the term "industrial property" with the terms "patent" and "trademark" in the search query is a way to filter the hits which may relate to real estate or the like.) The article could then focus on the use of the term "industrial property" vs the term "intellectual property". Cheers, --Edcolins (talk) 10:58, 4 January 2019 (UTC)