Intellectual property (IP) law was a crucial underpinning of of the global creative economy, particularly in the old Western countries, as it remains today in Britain, and as I understand it, Québec. The pre-Collapse law protected the rights of owners and creators to enjoy the fruits of various creative and innovative efforts, and protected the symbols of their identity. However, in the area that the New World Order calls 'na hyl na zritys merit', 'the law of informational property', circumstances have radically changed in the wider world. While not critical information for most travellers, this particular area of law and how it evolved through the Global Collapse and under the Order provides a fascinating insight into the workings of that oppressive but often very strange and inconsistent global polity.

Types of Intellectual Property

Current Status in the NWO

In the New World Order, the latter two categories are protected in an intelligible way, but the first two, copyright (na lifsik na koppi) and patent (na lifsik na uwíru) are fully devoid of protections. Artists and inventors do not enjoy legal protection from others freeloading and profiting off their hard work and need to find means other than non-existent legal protections to ensure that they are able to profit from their work. Royalties are a distant memory.

This situation has not fully stifled creativity and sharing in the Order by any stretch, but it surely has done nothing to foster it, either, as innovators jealously guard their secrets rather than the old regime of putting them in the public domain in exchange for a period of exclusive benefit of the shared knowledge. Secrecy suppresses collaboration and intellectual cross-pollination of all kinds, and the intention of the old IP regime was precisely to incentivise sharing, not hoarding, know-how and artistic creation.

The NWO system has powerful and articulate defenders. They would say that the old IP regime privileged certain states over others, raised prices, and actually stifled innovation under a sea of IP litigation. They point to an entire industry of parasitic 'patent trolls' that grew up to game the patent system to extort cash from productive economic players, similar predatory lawsuits aimed at musicians by the estates of longer established musicians seeking to wring profit out of a common chord progression, and the struggles creators faced seeking to make fair use of existing materials with bots scouring social media for hints of copyright material and making sweeping copyright claims. 

Within the NWO elite, this is an active policy debate, with the majority opinion globally still in favour of the current NWO system, and a vocal minority, advocating for the introduction of a legal regime for patent and copyright. The battle lines have significantly shifted away from an emotive 'Cascadia versus South China' narrative and more towards a wonky policy discussion between parties that see themselves winning or losing under any change. The powerful players in the world today have adapted to thrive under the law the way it is, which may explain why the status quo has proven so resistant to reform.

Trademark and trade secret, however, are protected in an intelligible and recognisable way and are vigorously defended. Access to these protections requires access to expensive lawyers, though, so in classic NWO style, not everyone benefits from these protections.

Trade secret fills in the role that patents served a hundred years ago. For something to be a trade secret, it has to not be known the public, the legal entity defending the trade secret must benefit from this proprietary information, and the entity must be shown to have vigorously legally defended its rights in the past, i.e., a relatively harmless instance of an employee blabbing needs to be addressed by coming down on that hapless soul with the full force of law to show the secret was actively protected.

Trademark allows you to register an identity with the government for conducting business, including names and symbols. Something already recognised as being in the public domain cannot be subsequently trademarked, trademarking has to create a unique and recognisable identity. NWO law is relatively restrictive, by historical standards, as to what you can trademark. However, not only is violation of a trademark a tort allowing the mark holder to sue, it is also a crime and the government may press charges against someone shown to have deliberately tried to falsely assume the identity of a different actor in the marketplace even if the mark holder does not try to defend their rights.

History in NWO Territory

Prior to the Global Collapse, there was a relatively vigorously enforced global intellectual property regime, but it was based primarily on the laws of certain traditionally rich and powerful countries and enforced by the harm those countries could do to bad actors through their control of access to their marketplaces. The United States especially had a huge cultural export sector and was responsible for countless innovations, and put huge pressure on other countries to respect their intellectual property law.

In other parts of the world, though, this pressure often generated resentment. There was in many other places much more of a culture that you could copy and profit off of any material you can get your hands on, and that the patent system limited their affordable access to crucial innovations. In other words, pressure from the United States to honour the treaties all parties had signed and to respect US intellectual property was in some instances felt as a manifestation of Western imperialism.

During the Global Collapse, international and sometimes even domestic enforcement of such laws fell by the wayside almost entirely. Any technology that any party thought could give it a leg up in those difficult times was shamelessly stolen or reverse engineered and adopted. And no one thought that protecting creators was an important priority at that time relative to whatever anyone had to do to scramble to survive.

Industrial espionage became common and brazen, to the point that companies were sometimes even fighting private wars with private armies over it, to everyone else's detriment. Fraudulently representing products, often defective or dangerous ones, as trusted brands became completely normalised and almost mainstream, obliterating consumer confidence to the detriment of better actors in the marketplace operating under their own brands, while at the same time exploiting whatever confidence remained to profit off the harms to consumers.

In other words, by the time of the founding of the Order, the world had had many years to get used to life without any of these protections. The Seattle Declaration had declared all prior international law and treaties to be null and void and illegal to follow or attempt to enforce, so there could be no path forward other than through New World Order law.

During the founding of the Order, the States were profoundly split over the issue of restoring the global intellectual property regime. Cascadia, the inheritor of Hollywood, with its huge cultural industries, and a leader in technological innovation desperately wanted a return to the old IP. Other formerly Western States tended to broadly agree.

However, this rankled many of the non-Western States, for whom this demand felt like being pressured by the hated United States all over again. They felt that free access to technology was crucial to addressing the enormous challenges the Order faced in restoring its collapsed economy and providing access to food, water and electricity in a world broken by conflict and ravaged by climate change. They did not buy the arguments about incentivising creation and innovation and felt those goals could be handled by different means.

When the Global Charter was drafted, the majority of delegates flatly refused to allow IP to be addressed in the Charter itself, and to preserve unity, Cascadia dropped their insistence that a resolution to this divisive issue be handled constitutionally and left it to be addressed later via legislation.

However, Cascadia itself did have a robust set of IP laws already on the books, and after the founding of the Order and failing to make any headway in the Global Parliament, Cascadia and Cascadian entities made plays to apply Cascadian laws extraterritorially, hoping to create some kind of fact on the ground driven by the size and importance of the Cascadian economy, similar to the tactics that often drove American hegemony pre-Collapse.

This effort on the part of Cascadia to try and bypass the Global Parliament when they didn't get their way and instead build a norm for IP protection through individual State legislation and soft pressure went over like a lead balloon. Very early on, to fully close the door on this tactic, the Global Parliament passed a High Law stating that all intellectual property legislation was reserved to itself and that all State laws in this area were automatically void, including within that State itself.

What followed was an increasingly nuanced and multi-sided argument between various factions and stakeholders who had something to gain or lose if the NWO legislated IP protections. That argument is going on today. There is a chance in the future, a couple generations later with the United States no longer a living memory to most people, that laws could be introduced. But to this day, the only legislation addressing copyright and patent is that original High Law that states no government other than the Global Government can touch this issue, and the Global Government still declines to do so.

Within the first decade, though, a trade secret regime and a trademark regime broadly following the example of pre-Collapse laws was enacted by the Global Parliament and started to be rigorously enforced by the Global Government.

In the case of trade secret protection, the rationale was to decrease the incentives for companies to resort to actual physical violence in defence of their business, and otherwise hopefully tone down the distracting shenanigans, which it did significantly succeed in doing.

In the case of trademark, it was a natural extension of the Order's ethos of outlawing anonymity and forcing everyone to be traceable and accountable for their actions, either in the real world or online. Resuming the registration of trademarks was a natural outgrowth of efforts to stamp out fraud and build consumer confidence.