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Soft redirect to Wiktionary?

Proprietariness, or being proprietary, is the state of something being property that is under the ownership of a person, group, or other entity, and for which the owner can therefore restrict use by others.

PROPRIETARY., n. A proprietor or owner; one who has the exclusive title to a thing. one who possesses or holds the title to a thing in his own right. The grantees of Pennsylvania and Maryland and their heirs were called the proprietaries of those provinces. Webster.

PROPRIETARY., adj. Relating or pertaining to ownership. belonging or pertaining to a single individual owner.

-—Proprietary articles. Goods manufactured under some exclusive individual right to make and sell them. The term is chiefly used in the internal revenue laws of the United States. See Ferguson v. Arthur, 117 U.S. 482 6 Sup. Ct. 861. 29 L Ed. 979; In re Gourd (C. C.) 49 Fed. 729.—Proprietary chapel. See Chapel.—Proprietary governments. This expression is used by Blackstone to denote governments granted out by the crown to individuals, in the nature of feudatory principalities, with inferior regalities and subordinate powers of legislation such as formerly belonged to the owners of counties palatine. 1 Comm 108.—Proprietary rights. Those rights which an owner of property has by virtue of his ownership. When. proprietary rights are opposed to acquired rights. such as easements, franchises, etc., they are more often called "natural rights." Sweet.^[1]

A substantial concern for society is the assertion of proprietariness to material that should be in the public domain. For example, in a 1989 congressional hearing, United States Air Force officer Ernest Fitzgerald testified that the designation of data as "proprietary" in military contracts was belied by "ample evidence that much of the material that is said to be proprietary is commonly available within the Defense Department and within the defense contractor community".^[2]

A proprietary product is:

One that has a unique formulation or characteristic and is therefore clearly distinguishable from other products. A proprietary product is usually one covered by a patent and is either manufactured by a single company or by other companies under licence. The term proprietary is often applied to medicines to denote the product of an individual company.^[3]

The word proprietary means a product that is designed, manufactured, marketed, and serviced under exclusive legal right of the inventor or manufacturer.^[4]

• Proprietary chapel, a chapel that originally belonged to a private person, but with the intention that it would be open to the public.
• Proprietary church, a church, abbey or cloister built on private ground by a feudal lord, over which he retained proprietary interests, especially the right of what in English law is "advowson", that of nominating the ecclesiastic personnel.
• Proprietary college, are for-profit colleges and universities generally operated by their owners, investors, or shareholders in a manner prioritizing shareholder primacy.
• Proprietary colony, a type of colonial administration in English America during the 17th century, and in the East Indies up to the 1850s. In the English overseas possessions, all land belonged to the Crown, which held ultimate authority over their management. All English colonial territories were partitioned by the Crown via royal charters into one of three types: proprietary, royal, or covenant. Under the proprietary system, individuals or companies (often a Joint-stock company) were granted commercial charters by the Crown to establish overseas colonies. These proprietors were then granted the authority to select the governors and other officials in the colony.
• Proprietary community, an idea developed by American anthropologist, business consultant and author Spencer MacCallum in The Art of Community.^[5] MacCallum defines community as follows:

  "A community is an occupation by two or more persons of a place divided into private and common areas according to a system of relations which defines and allocates responsibility for the performance of all activities that might be required for its continuity." (p. 3)

  "A proprietary community is a community administered as a proprietary enterprise in which the relations of every member of the community are formed directly with the proprietary authority." (p. 5)

• Proprietary company, a form of privately held company in Australia, Namibia and South Africa.
• Proprietary eponym, another name for a genericized trademark.
• Proprietary extension
• Proprietary file format, a file format of a company, organization, or individual that contains data that is ordered and stored according to a particular encoding-scheme, designed by the company or organization to be secret, such that the decoding and interpretation of this stored data is easily accomplished only with particular software or hardware that the company itself has developed.
• Proprietary hardware
• Proprietary lock-in
• Proprietary name
• Proprietary protocol
• Proprietary software
• Proprietary trading
• Trade secret

Look up proprietary or proprietariness in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

This open draft remains in progress (second notice).

This open draft remains in progress as of March 20, 2026.