Owning the Intangible

Welcome to the parent page for Owning the Intangible (OTI).

Owning the Intangible is a Tutorial (seminar for first-year students) at Grinnell College. In the course students develop skills in thinking, writing, reading, speaking, and working with sources while studying intellectual property (IP) and considering a variety of perspectives of IP in the twenty-first century.

Each student in the course writes an essay on an IP topic of his or her choosing. This year, topics have explored patent, copyright (and alternatives), trademark, and more. I have asked my students to post their essays on Wikiversity and they have generally agreed with this assignment.


 * /Introduction/ by TBD

Links to Papers


 * /IP vs. IP/ by Sadhana Athreya
 * /Patenting the Human Genome/ by Braden Brown
 * /True Ownership/ by Jayson Campos
 * /Sports Patents/ by Andew Clark
 * /Trademarks on Common Words/ by Morgan Counts
 * /CopyTube 2.0/ by Siddharth Dhananjay
 * /Originality/ by Peter Dixon
 * /Free Speech and Copyright/ by Martin Estrada
 * /Sharing Music/ by Andrew Frerick
 * /Music Sampling/ by Claire Tseng