A Comment on Intellectual Property

We've reached an interesting crossroads for intellectual property, and it goes beyond copyright vs patents, or even bits vs atoms. It is nowadays almost impossible to control intellectual property and still make it available to a mass audience or mass market. I'm not certain it makes much sense anymore to try. That said, I do believe that people and/or corporations that bring a product to market should have IP rights in the products themselves. But I do not believe that one has legitimate IP in ideas--memes, if you will. Ideas are passed from mind to mind, not from hand to hand. Despite some corporations' attempt at such mind control (non-disclosure agreements, etc.), ideas cannot be contained entirely in products.

For example, to permit a pharmaceutical company to own the right to any medicines that prevent blood clotting because they were the first ones to market with a particular drug that prevents such clotting would cause immense damage to innovation in the market. Yet that's the sort of thing that's happening in software and business method patents today. I also think the same thing happens when companies are allowed to patent certain genes--not the drugs developed to take advantage of certain bits of DNA, but the DNA itself. It also happens when companies are allowed to traffic in ideas without actually bringing products to market, as in the Blackberry case.

As for music, movies, etc., I absolutely agree with copyright and for the producers to make their own terms for the sale and use of the medium. But if they don't wake up to certain realities (the ease of duplication, near-zero cost of additional units, the proliferation of outlets), they are sunk. Not right, but true.