Knowledge & Intellectual Property
The official Chinese translation of the "World Intellectual Property Organization", a United Nations Specialized Agency, is literally "World Knowledge Property Organization". The attribute of "intellectual" relates to the intellect" which is the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively particularly about abstract matters. If "intellectual" is "property" at all, it already forms part of any person.
"Intellectual property" is a specialist area of intangible property law that protects the often-abstract results of intellectual effort of any person at international, regional and domestic levels. While traditional knowledge and knowledge in the public domain, other than their original expressions, are not proprietary, undisclosed information interpreted and value added, in an intellectual creative way, or in an industrially applicable innovative fashion, are proprietary. Thus most of the results of basic, incremental, disruptive or breakthrough research and development are proprietary and are protectable subject matters of intellectual property.
When actors manage knowledge in the sense of turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, maintain the knowledge in systems to enable access or transfer of the knowledge, an executive decision based on any general policy or specific guideline would have to be made. This is because if the protectable subject matter is disclosed without taking reasonable steps to protect it, the proprietary virtue of the knowledge, upon disclosure, will go to the public domain. Intellectual property subsumes under knowledge, but the margin is thin.
Anyhow, the lexical or common definition of "intellectual", whether in English or Chinese, has been modified by its stipulated use in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. Rather than wondering if there is any property in knowledge, many users, particularly netizens, wishfully think that whatever (whether proprietary or not) they can accesscan be freely transferred without any legal obligations. The fact is that only few would exercise their intellect to generate creative or innovative knowledge that is worth of protection, and intellectual property is meant to defer free riders and to prevent unfair competition.