Re: Can you own the number 10.5% ?

On Mon, Feb 01, 1999, John R. Levine <johnl[_at_]iecc.com> wrote:
>
> A friend of mine recently wrote a book about personal financial
> software. He mentioned in passing that the long term return on stocks
> is 10.5%, a number that he'd read in a newsletter from Vanguard. That
> number is widely cited in the press -- in a few minutes I found it on
> the web in an article in the Detroit News and a feature piece on family
> finance on Money Magazine's web site, with no citation of a source in
> either case.
>
> Shortly after the book came out, his publisher received a letter from
> Ibbotson Associates, who he'd never heard of until that point, saying
> that the 10.5% number was theirs since they were the only people doing
> long-term analysis of market returns, that was a number they'd
> calculated, and he'd misappropriated their proprietary number. I don't
> know if they demanded a specific remedy or not.
>
> It may well be the case that Ibbotson was the original source of the
> number, but I can't see how they have any claim on it. They can't
> copyright it since it's a fact, and it's well established that you
> can't copyright facts. It's not a trade secret, since it's not
> secret, it's published all over the place.
>
> Am I missing something here?
>
> PS: The obvious solution of getting a free or cheap license to make
> Ibbotson go away doesn't seem to be available, since they charge you
> $150 just to consider an application, before any licensing fee.

The owner of the rights to "Your Inner Child of the Past" would be ever so rich if he had a nickle for every time "inner child" was used for profit.

Albert Henderson
Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY
<70244.1532[_at_]compuserve.com> Received on Thu Feb 04 1999 - 00:04:58 GMT