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Alright... it is time to talk about Star Wars and intellectual property protection. But in a cool way. https://twitter.com/drfarls/status/1337088401560965127
Let's revisit our argument: Intellectual property protection at both the domestic and international levels has a big impact on the innovation and diffusion of military technology https://www.amazon.com/Patents-Power-Intellectual-Diffusion-Technology/dp/022671652X
A couple weeks ago we applied this lens to the "Alien" franchise, and discovered that IP law is pretty critical to the plot of Aliens and of the downstream franchise.
So... how does IP protection work in Star Wars? Well, it's fair to say that there's a) not a lot out there specifically about IP protection in the Star Wars universe, and b) way too much basic material for any person to competently sift through.
I'm building here on the efforts of @benwodecki , who uses some old Expanded Universe material but has observations that continue to stand up well. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/force-strong-one-ip-laws-star-wars-ben-wodecki/
To begin with, the Star Wars universe is not particular dense in terms of rules and norms. Characters and institutions rarely make legalistic arguments, instead relying on raw power, subterfuge, etc. to pursue their ends.
But this shouldn't stop us. Most societies have some means of characterizing and protecting intellectual property, especially at high levels of technological sophistication.
It would seem extremely likely that the Star Wars Universe during the periods of the Republic and the Empire would have a fairly loose system of "international" IP protection, with systems themselves having wide latitude to make IP rules.
The Empire, Republic, or Trade Federation (if it does anything useful at all) would help negotiate between different systems of IP to facilitate interstellar trade. We know that trade happens, and we know that trade involves high technology goods...
And so we would strongly suspect that there are legal understandings that underpin this trade, including intellectual property regulation.
We know a little bit less about supply chain diffusion, although given the level of technology in SW I find it quite unlikely that industry is self-contained on many of the core worlds.
This is to say that in military technology especially it's likely that many of the core companies are going to be systems aggregators, rather than building military equipment from scratch.
We also know that for some periods the defense industrial base is effectively privatized. At other times (as with the Imperial seizure of Corellian Engineering Corporation) the industry is nationalized, although that doesn't mean IP considerations go away.
But if you have private producers in the defense game then there *has* to be a system of IP law that protects both sides of the transaction, specifies right of repair, etc. And since warfare is interstellar this means there almost certainly...
... are going to be trans-planetary structures of IP protection. This is true even, for example, of relations between Incom (which makes X-wings) and the Rebel Alliance.
I should digress a bit here and point out that the imbalance in military equipment between the Rebel Alliance, Trade Federation, Empire, and Republic is not *necessarily* about IP law. Probably has more to do with specific military resources and obligations.
The Empire doesn't fly X-Wings not because it can't build or buy them, but because they don't fit the Imperial Navy's operational concept or resource base. Lotsa cheap fighters flown by lotsa cheap pilots just makes more sense.
But I digress... so we can infer that the Star Wars Universe has systems of IP protection that would be different from our own but at least in some sense recognizable as modern IPP. These systems enable Incom, for example, to make money by selling ships and services to the RA.
They also probably protect certain producers, privilege some in the industry above others, etc. We can also grant that the systems of IP are probably loser than in our world.
So where does that get us? What we know directly is that several Star Wars stories are built around espionage; the direct appropriation of intellectual property.
Death Star is the prime example, although it's complicated because a) the technology is stolen from the Empire directly, rather than from a private actor, and b) the Rebel Alliance isn't trying to replicate the Death Star, much less sell them on the open market.
These are key distinctions in how the United States government thinks about IP-related espionage; whether the victim is public or private matters, and what's being done with the tech after.
Just like the Rebel Alliance with the Death Star, the US took data from Tolkachev or the Foxbat from Belenko in order to learn to defeat the systems, rather than replicate them. Or so the story goes.
Whereas a foreign government appropriating tech from a private US company in order to give that tech to a private foreign company that would use the info to gain market advantage... that's a different story.
But while we don't have a *lot* of other explicit discussions of IP protection in Star Wars, we have one pretty good one that touches on a lot of the core issues.
The first four episodes of Clone Wars season six involves a clone whose implant has gone bad, triggering a premature execution of Order 66. This then triggers a conflict between the Republic, the clones, and the government of Kamino.
After the clone murders a Jedi, everyone wants to know what went wrong; the Jedi, obviously, Chancellor Palpatine, and the Kaminoans.
The episodes devolve to what amounts to arguments about rights to data, rights to repair, and trade secrets. The Kaminoans argue that their trade secrets will be in danger if they give the Republic or the Jedi too much information.
The Jedi and the Republic insist that they have a right to repair, and although we don't get into the specific legal terms, they seem to think they have a winning argument.
Except for the Chancellor, of course, who wants to use any legal obstacle available to *avoid* the release of any information on Order 66.
And last but not least, the clones formulate an argument about self-ownership, which is definitely relevant to notions of ethical bounds on IP protection.
That they ought to have knowledge of what technology has been put into them, whether or not they have the right to reject it, is still an important ethical claim.
Anyway, the issue is resolved largely by fisticufs, including at one point an unarmored clone defeating several armored clones in melee combat, demonstrating that stormtrooper armor does, in fact, suck.
And I wouldn't be surprised if that has something to do with how the Empire allocates IP rights among its suppliers...
It's also quite possible that the Chancellor could have used his legal powers to prevent diffusion of the information on something like a State Secrets Act, which I feel like is something that would exist in this political context.
On the question of clone self-ownership... https://twitter.com/LawSpider/status/1343615045712949248
Had not thoughts of this @LawSpider but I wonder who holds the relevant repair and data rights to Darth Vader's suit...
Here's a good piece on systems of data transmission in Star Wars https://www.vice.com/en/article/9a3mmp/the-disk-formats-of-star-wars-rogue-one-spoilers
