So I’ve been thinking a little about how we are often expected to trace the origin of an idea…especially in academic thinking. This idea seems umm….ridiculous perhaps? insane maybe? Its as if an idea were a pillar of a number of neatly stacked bricks creating a nicely defined, clean cut, very traceable origin where each brick built upon the previous. That seems totally delusional to me. What makes up my ideas? Pieces of conversations, the memory of something I read long ago that shaped my thinking whose origin is now long forgotten, an eavesdropped coffee shop comment by the overly pierced leather wearing dude to my left…and that’s only what I am AWARE of! We are constantly being informed by sources we’re not even consciously aware of that our mental models sift and order. Yet despite all we have this notion of property…intellectual property.

Well…if the origin of an idea truly is as nebulous as what I have suggested, and I have yet to hear a compelling argument to the contrary, then how can we own it? The answer for me is simple…we don’t. It should be called intellectual squatting. There is no such thing as a truly original idea, because we add a small piece onto years of borrowed information, squat on it for awhile and call it our own. Academic procedure states that we should trace that idea to its source…I say impossible/delusional. But beyond that…why? Why do we feel that we need to put our name and claim on what is a synthesis of a hundred different sources?

Industry says that IP is necessary to motivate innovation…I question that. To be brash and to go a little to the extreme (though not really), it motivates innovation in a fragmented world where we believe that ideas are neatly stacked bricks proposed by individuals whose nature is to be self-maximizing greedy ego-driven cogs whose primary (sole?) incentive is recognition and the pursuit of power. That represents a world view that, IMHO, has long outlived any value it once possessed. It reflects a particular assumption of human nature that, IMHO, has sat on the throne of truth for far too long without being questioned. It underlies our societal constructs that, IMHO, are crumbling all around us and tearing at their seams.

I’m not saying there should be no reward or financial incentive that is linked to effort or achievement as there is clearly a place for external incentives. It just seems to me that if our motivation as humans shifted from what amounts to a childish and self-centered one towards a mature recognition that we are part of a unified whole, progress that would previously have been undreamt of would now actually be within reach (e.g. use my idea freely because surely you can build upon it, build something from it/off of it, and we can see progress at an exponential rate…like…ummm…what’s that little experiment they ran…oh ya…opensource). I don’t think this evolution in human motivation is a vain or idealistic hope. I think its the next inevitable (unless we want to commit collective Seppuku) stage in societal development.

IP motivates innovation if the ultimate incentive of the innovators is self-centered much like competition drives progress in an economy of self-centered players. Sure…but if said players evolve (not unlike 13 colonies evolved their collective thinking to form a nation not too long ago), IP and competition become giant restraints.

We put a baby in a crib so that they don’t fall off the bed and training wheels on a bike when the kid is learning to ride, but there comes a point where the cage of the crib and the extra wheels become a constraint instead of a protection. So instead of fighting to keep the training wheels and the cage on our crib…maybe its time for us to grow up…have we reached that point?

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