  Originality criteria are frequently used to compare assets and, in
particular, to assess the validity of intellectual property (IP) rights such as
copyright and design rights. In this work, the originality of an asset is
formulated as a function of the distances between this asset and its
comparands, using concepts of maximum entropy and surprisal analysis. Namely,
the originality function is defined according to the surprisal associated with
a given asset. Creative assets can be justifiably compared to particles that
repel each other via an electrostatic-like pair potential. This allows a very
simple, suitably bounded formula to be obtained, in which the originality of an
asset writes as the ratio of a reference energy to an interaction energy
imparted to that asset. In particular, the originality of an asset can be
expressed as a ratio of two average distances, i.e., the harmonic mean of the
distances from this asset to its comparands divided by the harmonic mean of the
distances between the sole comparands. Accordingly, the originality of objects
such as IP assets can be simply estimated based on distances computed thanks to
unsupervised machine learning techniques or other distance computation
algorithms. Application is made to various types of assets, including emojis,
typeface designs, paintings, and novel titles.
