Yes you read it right. Holy crap! So on April the 26th, two days from now it will be World IP Day, a day where WIPO and the many IP guard dogs of the world (such as IP Australia) “encourage people to think about the role played by intellectual property in everyday life”. I too would like to encourage this. I think we all need to think about how IP affects us in every day life. I personally think the idea of intellectual property is one that can be argued from both sides, however I think it has gone too far in the best interests of profit and too far away from the interests of the public good and from a free and competitive market.
I can certainly understand how rewarding someone for an idea and granting them a temporary monopoly is a way to encourage them, however currently when we grant such a monopoly, it is for that idea across every possible implementation and every market, which locks the ideas out from places where the IP owner is not interested or able to take them. The monopoly terms are getting longer which means a longer period of time for generic drugs to be available to the masses, a longer time for new technologies to be affordable, and a longer time for inventions that can help us, sustain us, cure us, and make our lives easier to actually get into our hands. My other major concern with this “IP” system is that the few countries who defined this system and have a majority share in their system, have basically created an economy where other countries pay them for their ideas, which is loads and loads of money every year that leaves countries like Australia and goes straight to countries like the US. Even if we have a great invention, our ability to protect that “IP” is lacking because the IP system is owned and controlled by large overseas players.
As the Director General of WIPO says:
Ideas shape our world. They are the raw materials on which our future prosperity and heritage depend.
The Director General uses this as a rationale for why ideas and inventions should be protected and locked down so that people are encouraged to have them, whereas I see this as the very reason why we need to maintain a healthy balance between protecting such ideas for short term financial gain, and getting those ideas into the public domain as soon as is reasonable (and 25 or 50 years is not reasonable). The longer such great ideas are locked away from the free market and from the average person, the more we delay such future prosperity that WIPO themselves acknowledge is the result of such ideas.
So this is a shout out to the entire Open Source world to think about how IP is shaping your lives, how fair the system is, how much it actually protects inventors as opposed to granting large companies bigger weapons of mass obstruction. World IP Day is a good reminder to us all that we need to rethink some of these systems. Systems that were initially designed to encourage inventions, but nowadays are about encouraging payment of licencing fees.
Who will you talk to about it? This stuff affects our schoolkids (access to ideas), our aging population (access to affordable drugs), our security and elections (access to transparent and trustworthy applications), our national economies (access to a free and competitive market) and more. We face constant threats to national sovereignty (crappy bilateral “Free” trade agreements) and of course to the Free Software movement (patents, anti-circumvention and trademark issues). Politicians, school teachers, lawyers and many more people are starting to realise this isn’t quite right. In a funny way, we have Sony, Apple and CAL to thank for the average person starting to think about IP. So happy World IP Day for the 26th everyone! Let’s make sure we don’t become too lazy in this issue, after all, the biggest threat to freedom is a happy slave.
Note: If you want some great reading on this from someone who has studied it extensively from many different perspectives, check out the writings of Professor Peter Drahos.
