 Outside of the regimes of copyright, patent, trade secret, and trademark, there is a substantial set of case law that allows individuals to protect mere ideas as personal property. This system of property is typically called the “law of ideas” (Nimmer 1954, Epstein 1992). A highly publicized case in this area is Buchwald v. Paramount Pictures (13 U.S.P.Q. 2d 1497 (Cal. Super. Ct. 1990)), concerning the Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America. Buchwald approached Paramount Pictures with a movie idea and it was agreed that if a movie was made following Buchwald’s premise he would receive compensation. Buchwald did not fix his idea, for example by writing it down, and thus copyright infringement did not apply. After several years of false starts and negotiations Paramount notified Buchwald that the movie based on his idea was not going to be produced. Shortly after this notification, Coming to America was released and credit was given to Eddie Murphy. Even though the movie supposedly lost money, Buchwald sued and received compensation.