Is Cloud Computing Changing Intellectual Property Law?

The laws of copyright, patent and trademark are changing because cloud computing is making it possible to connect software "in just about everything," The New York Times' Quentin Hardy reports. For example, "everything, be it software and networking or power, is different when so many computers are spread across the globe. The pace of innovation is so quick, and the number of players so small, that in some cases, the players elect not to patent inventions, wary of what they’d disclose about themselves in the application," Hardy writes. 3-D printing may change things even more because "designs there can be widely shared and modified in a computer, to an extent that originals are hard to recognize, let alone protect."