The changing face of intellectual property: intellectual property--n. A product of the intellect that has commercial value, including copyrighted property such as literary or artistic works, and ideational property, such as patents, appellations of origin, business methods and industrial processes.

When even the trash man has an intellectual-property strategy, and technology companies give away their patents and record companies scrap the digital controls that prevent people from copying music, something has clearly changed.

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Intellectual property (IP) strategy isn't what it used to be. Congress may be on the verge of making the most dramatic changes the patent system has seen in decades, possibly in history--and this comes in the wake of recent, precedent-rocking Supreme Court decisions that made patents harder to get and defend. Technology has changed the game for copyright owners, who increasingly recognize that they have more to lose than to gain by defending their ownership claims.

New business models are emerging in a wide range of industries, as companies discover that opening up and even giving away proprietary information can be good business. These changes bring more choices, more complexity, more risk and, often, more opportunity to businesses driven by IP--and these days, more and more businesses are so driven.

Consider the case of Casella Waste Systems Inc., a Vermont-based disposal and recycling company with $300 million in market capitalization, $550 million in sales and an IP strategy unique in its industry. "We embarked on an IP journey some years ago, and it has a deeply changed our business model because it forced us to look at everything we do through the innovation lens," says President and CEO Jim Bohlig.

The journey began with a subsidiary called US Green Fiber, which converted old newspapers into home insulation. Before innovation, "the only differentiation between it and the competition was cost: it was cheaper than fiberglass," Bohlig says. But closer examination of the product discovered anti-fire, anti-sound and other deadening attributes that provided an opportunity for innovation, differentiation and new applications.

"We'd done the same thing in our waste business in much bigger ways," says Bohlig. "We probably have the largest intellectual property portfolio in the industry, including companies that are many times our size. That means published patents filed patents, trade secrets, the whole family of intellectual property, including trademarks. It introduced us to a whole new way to think of strategic planning."

For example, publicity about Wal-Mart's decision to require radio frequency ID tags on merchandise "led us to wonder what we could accomplish when the product is given back to us as waste. This got us involved in making an equity investment in Recycle Bank, a revolutionary business model for providing incentives and rewards to people who recycle."