Intellectual Property Issues May Be Our Greatest Enemy
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The big content owners have been determining the world’s intellectual property regimes for the last few decades.
By clever lobbying at extraordinarily boring conferences, they had managed by the late 90s to commit governments, through the world trade talks, to a draconian programme of laws extending the notion of intellectual property to the point where a Norwegian teenager can be threatened with jail when he writes a clever program to let him watch DVDs on his own computer - because he is said to be providing tools to steal intellectual property.
This is madness. Ideas aren’t things. They’re much more valuable than that.
Intellectual property - treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded - is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved.
It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live.
If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose.“
Read the full article on: Intellectual Property: The Patenting Of Ideas May Be Your Greatest Enemy.
[tags]ip,patents,intellectual property[/tags]