Italiano
BRIEF DISCOURSE ON THE LOGICAL AND LEGAL PROTECTION OF KNOWLEDGE Protect the intellectual property of human knowledge formalised inside an Ontology by Marco Maglio and Luca Severini © 2006 Copyright Epistematica Srl DOI 2006: 10.1683/ab0001

Scientific progress and the consequent technological innovations always positions man in front of unexplored territory. The understanding of social phenomena and economics that derives from practical applications on a large scale of the technologies is not always simple. Often the comprehension times are frequently long with respect to the diffusion of the technology. This comes mostly from the fact that man must have time to acquire those intellectual instruments necessary and sufficient for the elaboration of thoughts. Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, Science of Economics and of rights are the disciplines that offer some methods for the understanding of these new phenomena. However these themselves can seem naive in the case of rapid innovation on a global scale, such as those related to the Internet.

The arrival of the Internet has raised numerous questions that in the light of facts in most cases creates more non resolved problems. Of these the protection and safeguarding of authorship rights and of their developments are typical cases. In a future in which the functioning of automatic information systems depends on "declared" knowledge inside an Ontology published on the Internet, it will be important to understand those mechanisms that can be used to protect intellectual property of knowledge and the social and economic implications that could be caused

Certainly, "knowledge" begins to assume a "value" very diverse from that which until now man had the power to attribute, thanks to the fact that in this future even computers can use and benefit from automatically.

Read the Paper

Image: Sumerian sceptre to exercise law, Pergamon Museum, Berlin