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I haven't seen any information or thoroughly researched this idea or question. I'm not even sure it's an actual problem, but I'm wondering if certain replicated items infringe on copyright laws in the Star Trek universe?

LogicDictates
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Marla Smith-Ak
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    Do you mean "replicate" as in make a copy of a book or artwork, or "replicate" as in make a physical copy? – DJClayworth Aug 18 '21 at 00:53
  • I guess really anything that is licensed , trademarked or patented that they have the replicator create. – Marla Smith-Ak Aug 18 '21 at 01:04
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    Considering that the Federation generally doesn't use money, it's not clear to me if/how copyright law exists there. The answer probably varies from planet to planet. – ApproachingDarknessFish Aug 18 '21 at 01:06
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    @ApproachingDarknessFish You still have intellectual property rights in something you don't intend to sell for money. As the author it's your right to decide who may use it, who may duplicate or modify it, and what credit you want for any such thing. – Cadence Aug 18 '21 at 01:48
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    Apparently there is a law against replicating the success of the first two series, does that count? – JohnHunt Aug 18 '21 at 06:26
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    @JohnHunt you mean excluding Deep Space 9, which was the best of the Star Trek series. – DaveG Aug 19 '21 at 00:09
  • I bet the EMH would believe in copyright, regardless of whether it actually exists in the Federation. – Ham Sandwich Aug 19 '21 at 00:46
  • They replicated an entire Kirk in "The Enemy Within". – Barmar Aug 19 '21 at 15:57
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    @Barmar: And a Riker. And a Boimler. – ThePopMachine Aug 19 '21 at 16:43
  • Not specifically replicated, but the Algernon treaty prevents the Federation from using Romulan cloaking technology. The conditional use on The Defiant suggests licensing terms, so it seems pretty close to intellectual property/copyright. – mcalex Aug 20 '21 at 17:54
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    @DaveG; I actually did like DS9 and it's 3rd on my personal list, but nowhere near as successful as the first two. DS9 is Trek for Trekkers. – JohnHunt Aug 24 '21 at 17:51

4 Answers4

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Yes, there are Intellectual Property (IP) laws in the Federation.

In the ST:VOY episode Author Author the EMH Doctor writes a holonovel, which he submits to a publisher. The publisher steals the work. There is then a legal hearing to determine whether the Doctor has a right to control his own IP. The Doctor wins.

The publisher's legal argument is the the Doctor isn't a real person, so the IP rights do not apply. This demonstrates that the rights exist in the first place.

I don't know any source, canon or not, that describes whether copyright extends to replicator patterns, but I would expect it would.

Pete
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    I would add that aside from that one episode, IP is conspicuously absent from the Star Trek universe. I've never seen any other discussion of getting the rights or license to holodeck programs (or any software) or new technologies. – luther Aug 18 '21 at 14:56
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    @luther That's because holodeck software requires a monthly subscription with premium lootboxes purchases periodically, or you're immediately dumped into a timeshare seminar where the holodeck hologram tries to sell you on a 2 hour share of a condo on a Risa. There's no need for copyright. They just lock up your favorite programs which are stored in the cloud and streamed. – John O Aug 18 '21 at 16:32
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    I would add that IP rights could exist while still being rarely applied to everyday situations, if there was a large public domain, which there would be after hundreds of years (assuming rights expire). – jl6 Aug 18 '21 at 18:36
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    @JohnO - You're a monster for giving me that nightmare. – Fake Name Aug 19 '21 at 08:29
  • I'm pretty sure I recall Quark talk about obtaining replicator programs for his holosuites, but I can't remember any details of it, whether he was buying these or merely finding them. – workerjoe Aug 19 '21 at 13:44
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    This could be partly a matter of privacy laws rather than intellectual property per se--if someone writes something they don't want published (at least not in that form, as with a draft), and someone else gets their hands on it and makes it public, that may be embarrassing to the first person in a way that could be seen as a violation of privacy. If the Doctor had actually agreed to publish a draft, I don't think we can necessarily infer that in the moneyless world of the Federation it would be illegal for others to replicate copies without permission. – Hypnosifl Aug 19 '21 at 13:51
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    @luther Most holodecks we see are part of Starfleet, likely Starfleet has licensed everything for their employees. – Azor Ahai -him- Aug 19 '21 at 14:54
  • My takeaway from the comments and this answer is that it's not clear that this should be considered general canon rather than just a poorly-thought-out pasting of present-day assumptions into a cheap Nth relitigation of "does this artificial being have equal rights with humans"? – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Aug 19 '21 at 17:58
  • @R..GitHubSTOPHELPINGICE My thoughts exactly. Why are we discussing a supposedly sane(r) future in terms of our currently insane system? – Mad Physicist Aug 19 '21 at 21:48
  • @R..GitHubSTOPHELPINGICE, Do you happen to have a link that explains your user name? There seems to be a reference that I'm missing. – Mad Physicist Aug 19 '21 at 21:50
  • @MadPhysicist: Search for "github ice contract" or similar. The story behind it is that it came out of a question by me on meta about whether political messages in display names were ok after disagreeing with ones by other users, and after getting the answer, figuring Stack Overflow plus my high rep thereon made a good audience for this one. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Aug 20 '21 at 00:02
  • @R..GitHubSTOPHELPINGICE. Thanks for bringing that one to my attention. Wow – Mad Physicist Aug 20 '21 at 01:13
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Based on the TNG episode with the cryogenically frozen people that are thawed out, I'd be surprised if there were restrictions on replication (at least based on IP law).

Picard has to explain multiple times to one of the thawed folks who used to be rich that he is now in a post-scarcity society, and that money is a quaint idea they'd matured beyond.

Without money as a profit motivator, most of IP law doesn't make sense. There may be some sort of registry of who invented what, but without money there isn't really any reason to restrict who can replicate an item other than safety.

Morgen
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    Let's not forget that IP also protects artistic integrity. I can't repurpose someone else's characters for my own work regardless of profit motive, and I'm sure authors with personal connections to their work would not want their characters being written into stories they don't like. I'd expect that TNG-Disney would still want to stamp out X-rated Mickey Mouse movies even without profit motive to do so, for example. – Nuclear Hoagie Aug 18 '21 at 16:53
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    Rich Guy: No more money - well my portfolio prepared for that too. Picard: Even bitcoin went to zero. Scarcity is not demand during an atomic war. Rich Guy: Noooo. – lucasbachmann Aug 18 '21 at 19:13
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    @NuclearHoagie - "I can't repurpose someone else's characters for my own work regardless of profit motive, and I'm sure authors with personal connections to their work would not want their characters being written into stories they don't like" You can however do your own cover of someone else's song without their permission as long as you pay a certain legally set royalty rate. IP laws in their current form exist for the sake of the profits of IP holders and not to protect the feelings of creators, I doubt IP owners would be able to actively censor derivative works in the moneyless Federation. – Hypnosifl Aug 19 '21 at 13:57
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    @Hypnosifl In the US, the stated purpose of copyright law is simply to "promote the progress of the sciences and useful arts". You'll note that copyright law applies even to unpublished works, for which there can be no possible profit motive for the IP holder. IP laws are not strictly about profits. – Nuclear Hoagie Aug 19 '21 at 14:29
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    @NuclearHoagie - That was the stated purpose when the constitution was written, but as IP has become a bigger part of the economy the law has become more purely motivated by profit (look at the extensions of copyright law far beyond what they were originally, and beyond the likely lifetime of most creators). Further if it was about protecting creators rather than businesses, there'd be limits on the degree to which actual creators could lose all ownership if doing work for hire (think of cases like Alan Moore or Siegel & Shuster). – Hypnosifl Aug 19 '21 at 17:03
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    @Hypnosifl - I'm not sure about the details of US laws, but in most countries authors can prevent others from making a cover version of their songs. In fact, they can prevent most public uses of their work if they want. You can do a cover version of a lot of songs just because authors allow it for a fee and copyright management societies are there to manage the permission and the fee. – Pere Aug 19 '21 at 19:43
  • @Hypnosifl - Typo solved. Thanks for noticing. – Pere Aug 19 '21 at 19:44
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According to Memory Alpha there was a patented component seen in USS Discovery, and Harry Mudd made his living selling pirated technology to civilisations without paying any royalties.

In a post-scarcity world there would be no point to patents. The reason for them is that invention is a public good, meaning it costs loads to invent something (time, education, experience, equipment, etc.) but once invented costs virtually nothing to copy it, so less resources are allocated to inventing stuff than we'd like. Same with books and music - lots of time, equipment, and talent needed to produce it, virtually none to copy it. But if resources are free and unlimited, this reasoning no longer applies. Everyone can have 100% leisure time, can get as much education as they want on any subject, and can replicate any item of equipment they might need, and have advanced software that can fill in for any lack of skill or practice - the limitation then is no longer resources but interest. People only do stuff because they want to. Like people write open source free software, and offer their expertise on question and answer sites for free, because they have all their other needs supplied. The only reason to assert ownership of an idea is vanity.

Of course, in practice the Star Trek universe was in many ways clearly not post-scarcity. It would make for a boring show if it was. It's like the technology. As a science fiction fantasy, they clearly have many future technologies that can do marvellous things and solve all our present-day problems. But that just means they have to invent new more difficult problems needing even more advanced technology that they haven't yet got, to create drama and conflict. In the same way, future economics might solve many of our present-day economic problems, but the future will just invent its own even more difficult ones to be solved. And if you ever did manage to solve them all, then the problem would be boredom, like the Q Continuum. Humans are problem-solvers - we'd just go out and find more problems to solve. So despite Picard's Utopian claims, the future is always going to have scarcity-driven economics, and money, and a need for intellectual property. I'd bet six bars of gold-pressed latinum on it!

Nullius in Verba
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    I agree. ST:V was explicitly not post scarcity, with replicator rations and holodeck time being used as internal currency by the crew. Even in Federation space they relied on miners to produce the fuel for their reactors, without which the entire thing falls down. Although surely they could have used matter-energy conversion to turn their trash into power for their systems... – Corey Aug 19 '21 at 03:43
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    You might be interested in Iain Banks's take on post-scarcity. In fact it's very similar to your description of the Star Trek universe. Most people have infinite leisure and the ability to do what they want within reasonable bounds. People that want to experience adversity can join the fringe groups like Star Fleet or the secret service in Banks's universe. – Mad Physicist Aug 19 '21 at 21:54
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    @Corey. Fringe groups like miners and starfleet can exist even in a nearly post-scarcity society. Although I've always maintained that we can't have post-scarcity (and many other nice things) as long as we're the ones running things. – Mad Physicist Aug 19 '21 at 23:26
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I am almost certain the Ferengi would have a lot of copyright laws however IIRC there is nothing in canon about them.

The closest we come is either the fact that you need permission to replicate certain items such as weapons although this technically has nothing to do with copyright or the Voyager episode Author, Author which does not involve the replicator but does allude to certain aspects of copyright notably a creators rights to the use of their work.

It is likely that if a form of copyright to replicated items that The Federation would own all of them since to replicate an item you would have to use their replicator and it would be simple enough to require a transfer of the copyright in order to get permission to use the replicator. This is pure speculation as again there is nothing in canon that I can recall.

Revenant
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    The closest thing I can think of to the gut feeling you have about Ferengi is Quark being overjoyed that his childhood action figures were saved by his mom - I recall mint in original packaging. Collectors items imply that replicators haven't flooded the ferengi version of the 80s toy market. – lucasbachmann Aug 18 '21 at 05:41
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    @lucasbachmann Isn't replicated matter distinguishable from non-replicated? If so, collectors could easily identify and reject replicated copies of collector's items. – ApproachingDarknessFish Aug 18 '21 at 08:19
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    @ApproachingDarknessFish that has scary consequences for everyone who's ever used a transporter, essentially a replicator where the pattern is sent in from elsewhere. :-o – Grimm The Opiner Aug 18 '21 at 10:00
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    @ApproachingDarknessFish There are substances in the ST universe which can't be replicated, like for example Dilitihium or Latinum (which is why the Ferengi use it as a currency). It could be possible that collectors items contain unreplicable substances to distinguish them from replicated counterfeits. – Philipp Aug 18 '21 at 13:32
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    Yeah, you can't replicate gold-pressed latinum, which is why they value it so much. Though it turns out they consider the gold to be worthless, it's only the liquid latinum encased within it which holds any value. – Darrel Hoffman Aug 18 '21 at 16:38
  • @ApproachingDarknessFish Replicators are functionally transporters that use stored patterns. If you can transport a living being you can replicate one (refer ST:TNG episode 'Second Chances'). So no, you can't tell the difference... unless the pattern is specifically set up that way. 'Real' objects are complex though, so distributed patterns will likely have easily compressed, simplified internal structures which could be detected. Copying though? Trivial. – Corey Aug 19 '21 at 03:36
  • @Corey Considering that we've only seen transporter duplication happen once in all of canon, I don't accept that it is a "trivial" process. – ApproachingDarknessFish Aug 19 '21 at 04:10
  • @Corey Neither It is impossible for replicators to achieve sufficient fidelity to produce living matter. Their output is satisfactory most practical purposes, but that doesn't meant that the flaws aren't nonexistent or undetectable. – ApproachingDarknessFish Aug 19 '21 at 04:19
  • @ApproachingDarknessFish Replicators are just transporters with stored patterns. If you can transport a living person you can certainly replicate an inanimate object through the same process. A food replicator has to do a lot of work to replicate protein structures correctly, but if you think that's not enough we can throw a storage array on the side of a transporter and use that to replicate collectibles all day long. – Corey Aug 19 '21 at 05:56
  • @Corey Can you name any canon example where a transporter was intentionally being used as a replicator? Also, if transporters and replicators are the same thing, how comes that transporters are apparently able to transport un-replicable substances like dilithium or latinum? (If that were a restriction on them, then I am sure it came up at some time, but I can't remember any) – Philipp Aug 19 '21 at 08:46
  • @Philipp no, and nor do I need to. The fact that replicators are based on transporter technology is canon, and in several examples (Second Chances being a stark one) a transporter has effectively acted as a replicator. The only real difference is that transporters use a pattern buffer which (magically) holds the pattern of several people at once, all you need to do is provide enough storage to hold the same data indefinitely. – Corey Aug 19 '21 at 10:01
  • @Philipp on transporting power materials and latinum... these are not replicatable because of the complexity of their structure and quantum information, a problem which does not occur with (again, magical) pattern buffers. Replicators are also much smaller and less complex than transporters, which limits the resolution. Which is why I suggested simply using a transporter to replicate. It'd sure piss off the Ferengi. – Corey Aug 19 '21 at 10:04
  • @Corey The only way the transporter was able to (accidentally) replicate a living person was due to an unusually dense ionized atmosphere, conditions which it might be difficult to reproduce intentionally. I suppose you could go back to that planet with a load of latinum and try to recreate the scenario for fun and profit, but it's implied that Riker (both of him) barely survived the incident, so it's not without some significant degree of danger. – Darrel Hoffman Aug 19 '21 at 12:56
  • I know that TNG treats transporters like replicators, but I believe in the TOS and elsewhere it is implied that your molecules are scattered and transported and re-assembled by the transporter beam. Dr. McCoy I believe commented on this a few times. So at least in some parts of Star Trek lore the transporter is NOT like a replicator. – workerjoe Aug 19 '21 at 13:52
  • @workerjoe I don't usually take a medical professional's off-hand comments and gripes as engineering gospel. Do you? – Corey Aug 19 '21 at 23:16
  • Regarding transporters the simple fact - despite the onscreen evidence - is that it is impossible to store the information of a real object. Transporters have to move things without measuring them. (Again I realize the show doesn't support this.) A replicator has to have a pattern that is a reasonable size. And that's where the difference lies. – lucasbachmann Aug 20 '21 at 05:27
  • @lucasbachmann That makes no sense. Transporters have to reassemble matter in exactly the same configuration as the original, down to the last atom or living things wouldn't be able to survive it. That wouldn't be possible without some form of measuring. Further, the DS9 episode "Our Man Bashir" establishes that transporter patterns of people can actually be stored, although it does take every last bit of available memory from the station's main computer to store the patterns of five people. – aleppke Aug 20 '21 at 21:14
  • @aleppke if some fictional universe had transporters that had your quantum waves flow from point A to point B there would be no need to measure anything because nothing was taken apart. Star Trek's problem is that it makes this claim of disassemble reassemble slice and dice and annihilate and rebuild from a pattern which is computationally impossible and if it were - no clear reason a pattern couldn't be used twice. – lucasbachmann Aug 20 '21 at 22:29
  • I'm not sure it's ever stated that they're even digital. Could be totally analog. Yes, there are a couple of episodes where they "cheat" and use the transporter to re-produce someone as if replicating them, but I believe fans, critics, and writers all agree that such are cheats that make for bad writing. – workerjoe Aug 22 '21 at 05:19