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I’ve always seen irony in the acronym “IP” for “Intellectual Property,” a term that is difficult to escape if you spend any time in front of high-tech media. In the IT industry, everybody knows that IP stands for “Internet Protocol.” Of course, I’m sure you’ve already noticed this confusion, and you’ve probably heard others mention it before now. This curious repetition could easily go in the category of eerie but irrelevant oddities, like the classic announcement that “live spelled backwards is evil.” The significance, however, is not in the mere collision of two-letter acronyms. The thing that is funny (or sad, depending on your temperament) is that, more than likely, the reason this collision occurred is that the corporate attorneys and portfolio managers who visited the “Intellectual Property” buzzword on the IT industry didn’t even know what the Internet Protocol is.

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