Intellectual Anarchy

One thing that has never made much sense to me is how we draw property lines around ethereal things like ideas, to create the nonsensical and destructive policy of granting "intellectual property". It is rather improper to call ideas property in the first place, or to say that the "theft" of such is possible, due to the non-rivalrous nature of such "property". That is to say that "stealing" someone's idea does not deprive the original owner/creator of the idea of their right to use that property as they wish; therefore its not stealing -- it's learning, and it is the basis of evolution and growth in our society. Patents on design, method or concept are unjustifiable, as I will argue, and they harm the process of innovation and technical evolution… and this harm is accelerating as we proceed through the fast-paced communications revolution that started in 1995, with the consumer embrace of the internet. The benefits of patents seem to be largely overstated, unprincipled, and, again, becoming increasingly marginalized as we accelerate into the future. The only concession on this front that I am willing to make is in the case of trademarks, as I see them as being crucial for product differentiation in the marketplace, but perhaps some of my readers could convince me otherwise.

Anyway, I've heard 2 major claims that are supposed to intuitively justify using coercive legal means to monopolize ideas and concepts: one which stems from a prospective of social justice (recognition of one's contribution, and due profit); and another which comes from a utilitarian approach, which claims that the prospect of such legal monopolies on information are the necessary incentives for many inventions to come to be in the first place. Well, hogwash.

One the first point, generally speaking people get recognized for results, not "plans". That is, I have a lot of really neat ideas that might help people in many ways, if not just enjoy life a little more, but they are meaningless unless they can be formulated into tangible profit-generating items. Surely if I have some great idea or design about something I shouldn't be able to exclude other people from trying to implement them. Or if I do end up attempting to utilize my idea in a market setting, should I exclude competition from potentially more creative and efficient sellers? We all know that monopolies are bad, and this is monopoly in its purest form, a monopoly which, on average, lasts for 20 years from the filing date.
On that note, the trends in granting intellectual property are quite troubling. We are seeing exponential increases in the application and granting of patents. This kind of exponential exclusion of ideas from the market at such a rapid era of growth is an incalculable stab to the potential of progress.

In the case of scientific research, people get published and recognized all the time. The driving force for university publication is prestige and qualification for pay raises or job perks such as tenor. In industry, the profit incentive to innovate and create will always be the main driving force necessary for progress to move on. While it is true, the artificial incentive created by a promised legal monopoly on a new product is a solid safety net for inventors, and might stimulate efforts to be the first to innovate and capture a monopoly on that product, but it stops there. As soon as a company plants its proverbial flag on the innovation, it need not fear anymore competition for the duration of its legal monopoly. As a result, prices are no longer set through competitive production, distribution and supply and demand, but are instead at the mercy of the monopolist. This is especially well exemplified in the ridiculous price of medicines from biopharmaceutical companies which hold such patents. High prices lead to less accessibility and underutilization of goods, and would-be innovators in the realm of production and distribution are left waiting until the patent expires. Further innovation of the patented product is stagnated and wholly dependent on the permission of the patent holder to allow modifications unto the marketplace.


Contrary to popular opinion, innovations will still occur under a state of free information. The incentive to create exists in many forms. Firms that innovate will have the benefit of being the first to the market with the product, not to mention the reputation of being innovative and successful. Without the prospect of intellectual property protecting the innovation investments of large firms, they would have to prepare to enter the market at full steam and use the advantage of being first to the game, and developing market credibility. Inventors can still secure royalties by selling their ideas to industrial producers through contracts. Entire companies can organize around attempting to harness human creativity and offer royalties to all people with ideas worth pursuing to the marketplace. It would be the ultimate in creative cooperation for mutual gain.

Ever wondered why you don't have that cool roller to apply sunscreen on your own back? Or how about the bong that doubles as a vibrator (US Patent #7122000)... these are just a few examples of countless patents monopolized by morons who can't market their products successfully. Silly examples, but there are many good ones. One that touches me personally is that old SNES Chronotrigger fans might never get to enjoy a fully updated 3D version of the classic masterpiece of a videogame -- one such open development plan had gotten well underway before being shut down by Square Enix Co., the owners of the original game: http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/
To impose limits on competition through patents only slows the process of innovation and efficiency which provides us with better services at lower prices.

In the spirit of the mission of this blog, I would like to end by expressing the radical uncertainty in which the future lies. We simply do not know how the marketplace, driven by the creative minds of hundreds of millions of profit-seekers and entrepreneurs, will spontaneously organize around the free exchange of ideas, nor how future innovations will change the way we share, exchange and implement information, or how much farther the envelope of innovation will progress. One thing is clear, the future lies in inclusion, competitive cooperation, and participation by as many players as possible, and intellectual property stands in direct opposition to these principles through exclusion and monopolization.

Free yourself from propertied software:
Check out a great, free alternative to the Windows operating system: http://www.ubuntu.com/ , which provides you with the same features, greater security, and stability.
You can even buy your next Dell loaded with Ubuntu with full technical support: http://www.dell.com/open/ .
Educators should incorporate "creative commons" licensed lectures to complement their classes, like from http://www.ted.com/ .
If you plan to continue using Microsoft, check our this list of some excellent open source software that can replace most of your paid or illegally pirated software seamlessly, http://www.opensourcewindows.org/ .
The future lays in intellectual anarchy.

State of Fear

Although for the most part I believe that our current rate of growth in technology and information is generating so much potential for exponential wealth and standard of living increases that it will free us from the Leviathan of government control (mainly because our society will become far too complex and changing far too rapidly for any central authority to attempt to keep up with management and regulation), there is still one major danger that seriously threatens our potential for growth and freedom.

September 11^th symbolizes this great danger to liberty and progress as we move through the 21^st century: Fear. The events themselves are violently twisted and demented, but in overall magnitude of lives lost and damage done deliberately (which is an important distinction, as compared to automobile deaths for example, which are much more grotesque but are a result of error rather than deliberation) they themselves pale in comparison with the deliberate fiscal and human costs of the subsequent Iraq and Afghanistan incursions.

At the writing of this blog entry, the Iraq war/occupation had cost American tax payers over $450 billion, with 3,774 dead and 27,767 brutally mangled, by official counts (www.antiwar.com). Infrastructure damage to Iraq can't even be calculated in any meaningful way, nor have such estimates been attempted, but conservative estimates put the civilian deaths at somewhere between 71,000 and 78,000 (IraqBodyCount.org), though some studies (i.e. The Lancet/John Hopkins University study) claim almost 10 times as many deaths.

All of this made possible by political exploitation of people's irrational fears and ignorance of the long chain of cause and effect which had lead to the events of September 11^th. No one really asked “why?”. The best interests of American citizens, to withdraw our foreign military bases and end out meddling in unstable regions, were never considered. On the right, Neoconservatives have done especially well at hijacking the catastrophe and using a campaign of fear to further their “big government conservative” agenda. The spineless left has adopted the same tactics to protect their political office from seeming “soft” on defense. Once again the two-faces of American politics failed the American people, but did a good job of scaring them shitless and leading them down the war path.

This same kind of fear is emboldening an ever growing consensus that we are undergoing an anthropomorphically generated global climate change, with impending disastrous consequences, and that immediate governmental action must be taken to prevent it. Michael Crichton recently dealt with this idea in a marvelously enjoyable novel called “State of Fear”, in which he presents a plethora of sourced scientific data which runs contrary to the conventional wisdom on global warming. It is a fascinating topic which I will devote a future post to, but for the purposes of this entry I wish only to draw the parallels between the use of irrational fear and hysteria instead of solid and consistent information, logic and reasoning to explore the theory of global warming and the justifications for an invasion of an non-threatening foreign nation.

I foresee the 21^st century as a struggle between the freedom that promises prosperity and the fear that threatens to strangle it. But perhaps the same could be said about the entirety of human history. I just hope freedom wins this time around.