Category: Four pillars

Paul Cox commented on a recent post of mine, where I cited The Openness Aversion. Here’s Paul’s comment:

• Its easy to belittle the owners of intelectual property in the manner that you do. I doubt your readers would agree with you if they had earned valuable intelectual property.
• It would be my experience that the value generated from IP is approximately equivelent to the necessary and high amount invested in earning the IP. If it just fell from the sky as you seem to think, it would be easy to give it away.

So here’s my take on it:

1. I have considerable respect for the creators of intellectual property. So do most of the people who participate in this blog. Incidentally, many of my readers create valuable intellectual property and find no problem with (a) being paid for what they do and (b) being free to share what they do with others.
2. When it comes to ownership of intellectual property, again I have no problem with the concept. I do, however, have a major problem with current intellectual property law. Law which is needed to “protect” the “intellectual property right”. Law that is fundamentally flawed, consisting of much that was written in a different time, for a different purpose, and with a narrow view on the cultures and geographies it needs to embrace. Law which was not drafted or legislated for dealing with the digital world in the first place.

3. I have no simple way of challenging your statement that the value generated from IP is approximately equivalent to the investment made in creating the IP, but I would guess that this is not true across the board in the context of patents and copyrights, particularly in a digital age.

4. What I do believe is the following:

(a) Ideas are free

(b) Creators and co-creators of value need to be compensated for the investment made in creating that value

(c) The current laws governing intellectual property are deeply flawed in their ability to do this

(d) From a patent perspective, we have entered an age where the costs and pitfalls of discovering prior art are spiralling out of control, even with modern search tools. This has led to defensive patents, frivolous patents, patent spam, whatever. The system is broken, and even patent lawyers and professors tend to agree about this.

(e) There are similar problems with copyright law not keeping up with the times in the context of the cost and efficiency of reproduction and distribution, again particularly in a digital environment.

(f) Most attempts at DRM are counterproductive; they have extremely high administrative and maintenance costs, make it hard for information to flow or be shared, increase the cost of accessing, enriching or improving that information. From an enterprise perspective I think it is indefensible for a CIO to pay for submerging data under six foot of concrete and then paying again for extracting that very data.

(g) There are a lot of people far more qualified than I am to comment. Terry Fisher and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and Larry Lessig, to name just a few, have spent considerable time and energy, valuable time and energy, seeking better compensation models for the creators. Do read their works if you are interested. This is not an issue that will go away.
(h) If we do nothing we will have more idiocies like region encoding of DVDs and Mickey Mouse Acts. So far no one has shown me how these things help the creator or the consumer. Or for that matter economic value generation.
That’s it for now.

MissRogue does her usual Come-From-Left-Field bit and explains why she takes extreme positions when discussing traditional and viral marketing. Well worth a read.
At the risk of being more extreme than Tara (as if that’s possible :-) ), I don’t think there is any middle ground on this.

Marketing is now about customers co-creating product, recommending to their network, making these recommendations independently yet subjectively, based on a personal experience of a product’s usefulness.
I don’t think this can be gamed. The cost of discovery-of-quality-or-usefulness is now so low that no amount of marketing money or strategy can apply enough lipstick to porcine products. And any attempt to apply said lipstick is likely to backfire and contaminate other products belonging to the same brand or stable.

Cory Doctorow pointed me (thanks, Cory) at this recent article from the FT: A closed mind about an open world. In it, James Boyle makes some very interesting points, I can only recommend you read it.

Here’s a sample quote from the article:

Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production.

Understanding why “we” undervalue these things is critical to the three big I-battles we face: Intellectual Property, Identity and the Internet.

It is not enough for those that “get it” to go into a mutual-admiration huddle and back-slapping frenzies, as we are often wont to do. Those that don’t get it don’t get it for a reason. The commonest reason is an inability to comprehend three apparently simple things: that people can be altruistic; that extreme nonrival goods can and do exist; that people can make money because-of-rather-than-with.

James makes some excellent points in helping us bridge that gap of understanding.

But he also makes one very worrying one, something that has bothered me for quite a while. While we fight for openness in systems, networks, markets and information, the environment we fight in is becoming more closed. Many of the disruptions we’ve seen over the last two decades would not be allowed to happen today. And this is something we need to guard against, particularly in the context of regulation. Things like DOPA and Net Neutrality and Brand X and Mickey Mouse and DCMA. We live in challenging times.
But you know/the darkest hour/is always/always/just before the dawn. It may be a Long Time Coming, but it’s coming.

Great phrase from Miss Rogue. A post that deserves analysis and comment, but the phrase is worth a post all by itself. Thanks, Tara!

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