Protection’s attributes are duration, exclusion, disposition, and takings.
Epstein ’17 [Richard; October 5; Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU School of Law; The Oxford Handbook of Intellectual Property Law, ed. Rochelle Dreyfuss, and Justine Pila, “The Basic Structure of Intellectual Property Law,” Oxford Academic]
The initial decision to protect IP rights leaves open the major question of how its attributes should be configured. On this topic, we should expect the same variation in the forms of IP as with physical property, given the profound legal differences for legal regimes in land and water.102 No one can take physical possession of IP rights, so it is pointless to ask whether IP rights reach to the heavens or descend to the center of the earth. Nor is it important to think about easements over neighboring property. But at least four other dimensions demand more detailed analysis: duration, exclusion, disposition, and takings. The proper approach to these matters rests on the “carryover thesis,” which seeks to make as few adjustments to the various systems of physical property in order to develop the optimal system of IP.