The Question of Ownership
A while ago, others wrote about the conundrum of the concept of “intellectual property” (Cory Doctorow and Mike Masnick; Russell McOrmond has also been concerned about the use of the phrase as jargon for some time). Many of the lectures presented by the Centre for Innovation Law & Policy have also touched on the link between creativity and ownership of that creativity.
I’ve been mulling over these thoughts, and am trying to make some sense of why and whether physical output is fundamentally different from intellectual output. It is difficult to penetrate this because it suffers from similar philosophical challenges as the link between the mind and body.
Issues of copyright are seeming to develop more shades of grey in the differentiation between the ownership of a thing and the copying of an idea. Copyright law generally prevents ideas from receiving protection, but whether it’s a question of basketball, wanting to be someone’s boyfriend, toilet paper or other silliness, people are pushing the limits of what can be protected by copyright and what can be owned.
The problem is perhaps how easily ideas can now be stolen from creative persons to be made into the fortunes of the business-savvy. One of the recent examples of this is OLPC’s XO laptop, which is threatening to be another Atari 400 or Commodore 64. Although it would be difficult to successfully argue that the concept of an inexpensive and small portable computing device was “stolen” or “belonged” to the pioneers at OLPC, their literal inability to deliver the XO is suspected to be a factor in the departure of some of the major minds behind the project.
Of course, an idea on its own is almost completely useless. Whether it is political, philosophical, artistic, technological, musical or otherwise, an idea which never gets past the conceptual stage is little more than exercise for your brain. But how do we find a balance between rewarding the birth of new ideas and allowing people to stand on the shoulder of giants?
Tags: clip, copyright, cory doctorow, ip, mike masnick, olpc, philosophy, russell mcormond, xo laptopRelated posts
By Julianna Yau
On March 22, 2008
At 2:34 pm
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