Quasi-property is a legal concept, in which some rights similar to ownership may accrue to a party who does an act which benefits

society A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Soci ...

as a whole. Black's Law Dictionary defines "quasi" as being "almost" or "resembling" - but not actually the same as the suffix item. Property Law gives the

owner Ownership is the state or fact of legal possession and control over property, which may be any asset, tangible or intangible. Ownership can involve multiple rights, collectively referred to as title, which may be separated and held by different ...

of real property or personal property a "

bundle of rights The bundle of rights is a metaphor to explain the complexities of property ownership. Law school professors of introductory property law courses frequently use this conceptualization to describe "full" property ownership as a partition of var ...

" for beneficial use, such as the right to sell the property or right to lifetime use of the property.

Examples

A notable and early occurrence of quasi-property being found by a

court A court is any person or institution, often as a government institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in acco ...

under

American law The law of the United States comprises many levels of codified and uncodified forms of law, of which the most important is the nation's Constitution, which prescribes the foundation of the federal government of the United States, as well as v ...

was the case of

International News Service v. Associated Press ''International News Service v. Associated Press'', 248 U.S. 215 (1918), also known as ''INS v. AP'' or simply the ''INS'' case, is a 1918 decision of the United States Supreme Court that enunciated the misappropriation doctrine of federal intellec ...

. The

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. ne ...

sued

International News Service The International News Service (INS) was a U.S.-based news agency (newswire) founded by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in 1909.

for taking the substance of AP

news News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events. N ...

stories, rewriting the articles, and publishing the stories in its own member

newspapers A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports ...

. This activity did not violate

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

law because the original AP articles were not copyrighted, and also because the subsequent INS articles copied only the facts— using different language to report the story. Nonetheless, the Court recognized an interest in the news distributor of information they had researched and gathered. A traditional property right would have granted the AP a right to exclude others from the content of their news stories good for all time and against everyone. The court described this new right as ''quasi''-property because it only granted them the power to exclude their competitors for a limited amount of time from the substance of their articles. The

general public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlic ...

had free rein to distribute the subject matter of the news without restriction. Creation of the new right was justified as protecting the AP from the "unfair competition" of a party who was reproducing the information and attempting to profit by distributing it faster than the creator. Another prominent example of quasi-property under US law is the continuing ownership of a person's right to publicity even after

death Death is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain ...

Examples

References

See also