On Sharing Ideas

Today, I have no conversations to harvest for content, so I shall be writing entirely of the cuff. I’m not exactly sure what to write about, I could steal a topic once again from the same friend of mine I have these conversations with, but that feels like cheating. In fact, that brings me to an interesting line of thought.

I’m a thief.

I steal ideas all the time, take other people’s work and build upon it. Rarely do I create anything completely from scratch, my inspiration always coming from without rather than within. I’m a remixer, rather than an original craftsman for the most part. Okay, so thief is a rather loaded word with several negative connotations, but it pulled you in, right? Right? Hello, anybody there?

That’s the way the world is moving though and I’m glad for it. People working together, building and riffing off each other, old ideas being used in new and interesting ways. Collaboration is the new creation and I think the world is better off for it. We currently live in a world where the act of creating things only has worth of it can be monetised and turned into a revenue stream. We live in a world where revenue sources are jealously guarded, everyone wanting to have an edge of everyone else to enlarge their share of the pot at the expense of the others. That’s capitalism and it’s not a bad thing per se. Capitalism promotes competition but the way it’s going, with the laws we are putting or already have in place, it’s becoming a stranglehold on creativity and innovation. So many companies make their money not from innovating, but by actively harming and restricting the ability to innovate in others. Patents exist purely to limit innovation temporarily be forbidding others to use and extend another work without paying for the privilege. I agree that ideas are worth a lot, but I disagree that ideas are worth money. Implementations, sure, but the ideas themselves?

I’m a big fan of pure research and development, of shared knowledge and collaborative exploration. I think as a species it’s going to be vital, for us to develop, to work together on developing new ideas and technologies rather than fighting to push each other a step behind. When a company rips off another’s design and sells it as their own, that’s wrong. If another company takes one companies design and makes a tangible improvement to it, building on the shoulders of giants, I don’t see a problem with that. After all, the money is in the implementation. If a company can’t implement what it has itself designed better and faster than a competitor can improve upon and implement it, well, there is a problem.

Of course, that’s a naive view point to have, research isn’t free after all and companies need to recoup the costs of research by getting a temporary monopoly on their creations, to give them a head start. That’s fine, I have no problem with that, it seems like a pretty fair way to reward people for putting in the effort to enrich the body of human knowledge. Except when temporary means 50+ years. That is ridiculous. If you can’t make a profit from something after 5 or 10 years of developing something then you frankly don’t deserve to. Speculative ideas should be shared with the world, and in idea without a cold hard implementation is just that, speculative. Be safe in the knowledge that if someone does manage to use your idea, improve on it and make some money, you can always try and enter the market again using the new and improved version and, after all with your expertise in the crafting of the original ideas, you may be able to get a new edge.

The same with copyright as with patents and the like, more than 5 or 10 years is silly. It doesn’t promote innovation, rather it promotes making it big and resting on your laurels, suing anyone who dares to infringe because that’s often easier than actually creating. Besides, having your work reused and remixed is a form of additional exposure and if you keep creating new works, then you keep creating chances to profit while diffusing your work into the public domain for people to build upon and enjoy, further widening your exposure.

To me it seems counter-intuitive to stop people from improving upon and developing the work of others. I mean, if a company develops a cure for cancer but can’t afford to implement it and another does, surely that’s good for everyone involved? The original company gets accredited with the discovery, the second gets to profit from their investment in manufacturing, people get to be cured of cancer. Wins all round. I mean, I don’t know about you, but any company that developed something like that, I’d keep an eye on and invest in. The fact that they made something possible seems like it’s worth investing in. It doesn’t make sense not to reward them, after all, they are enabling other avenues of profit for others, if not directly for themselves. Patent laws and what not are designed to make that rewarding mandatory, but more often than not those artificial restrictions are used as weapons to attack others rather to ensure a fair reward. That’s why I’m in favour of requiring hard implementations rather than ideas. Ideas are free and thrive on being shared and developed by others, it seems a crime to limit that, to stop people from improving things just because you had an idea first but are incapable of implementing it well or at all.

It’s not a simple system and there aren’t any simple answers, but I can’t shake the idea that it’s better to share ideas than not.

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