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intellectual property takes knowledge out of the public domain - really?

Why would anybody believe that?

A copyright work must be original-must be created.  It is not in the public domain. The claimed subject matter of a patent must not just be novel, it also has to be non-obvious with respect to what is in the public domain.  Stuff protected by intellectual property law ends up in the public domain after the monopolies have expired, but it isn't possible to take stuff out of the public domain.

First of all it was publicists who peddled the story.  Look at this article from the BBC .  Yes, it's old but you can see that the charity and the BBC reporter really believe that if you could develop a new process of making salted chips, then the product 'salted chips' was taken out of the public domain.  Of course quite a few IP specialists seem to have thought that too given the fuss over the House of Lords decision in Kirin Amgen which denied such monopoly protection to a public domain  product.

This misunderstanding is however, becoming quite commonplace today and is being used to justify an attack on the existence of the intellectual property system. Dr Birgitte Andersen, Reader in the Economics and Management of Innovation in the School of Management and Organisational Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London published an article on 12th September 2005 that appears to suffer from this misapprehension and supports an idea of "global commons" to replace the IPR system.

An article by Andrew Brown in the Guardian on 19th November 2005 starts an emotive attack on the IP system from a similar premise. Both Andrew Brown and Dr Andersen are motivated by the publicity given to patents on the human genome, computer implemented inventions and business methods. Certainly some of the patents being issued by the US PTO seem to suggest that some favoured patentees are succeeding in privatising parts of the public domain. However, when one of the country's leading technology broadsheets (sorry  tabloid) can say  Ideas are increasingly treated as property - as things that have owners who may decide who gets to use them and on what terms as if the patent system were a novelty and the law had recently changed, it seems clear that we have forgotten what invention really is.

The DTI thinks that the Patent Office should improve business understanding of how to create and use IP. There's clearly a long way to go.

the economic justification of the patent system

The simple model of monopoly in exchange for disclosure that the patent system represents assumes that the patent holder will use the monopoly to transfer the technology to the public, creating wealth and employment along the way.