Is soup a work?

The topic of intellectual property isn’t very catchy unless there’s a scandal about plagiarism or the use of someone else’s recipes. From time to time, there are cases of wholesale utilization of other people’s recipes, whether on a blog or in an e-book.

And usually, it turns out that the aggrieved parties have no clue about intellectual property rights. World Intellectual Property Day is a good opportunity to shed some light on this issue.

Firstly, intellectual property rights and copyright are not the same thing! Just like family law is not the same as civil law. Family law is a part of civil law (alongside inheritance law, for example).

Similarly, in this case, intellectual property rights is a broader concept that includes, in simplified terms, not only copyright but also patent rights and industrial property rights. In Poland, when this topic arises, it is often implicitly limited to a very narrow and one-sided interpretation of copyright. This crucial issue (as seen, for example, in vaccine production) concerning practically all aspects of our lives is reduced to the interests of a narrow group that likes to call themselves “artists” or “creators” and, more importantly, the lobbying efforts of large corporations in their financial interest (which is completely different, even opposite, to the societal interest, i.e., all of us) for increasingly restrictive…