zondag 20 november 2005

Owning ideas

An essay in The Guardian discusses the difficulties around the concept of owning ideas, something I believe should not be possible in the first place.

"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. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us."

2 opmerkingen:

  1. Hi Yme,

    In a world of Open Source, Creative Commons, etc. there is still a place for patents and copyright, but do these apply to ideas or something else?

    Patents and copyrights are there to protect investments made to perfect a certain "idea". But the problem of course is: where do you draw the line...

    What certainly cannot be owned is a meme (a unit of cultural transmission). Other examples of memes are: thoughts, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods.

    I believe thas if some party claims ownership over a meme, the communities that refer to this meme will creatively mutate their communication-style to prevent legel implications.

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  2. Legel = legal :-s.

    Blogger feature request: editing any of my comments I made on a blog...

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