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BLOG@IP::JURPatent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006Will Mass Creativity Be The Next Big Thing?From Mr. Bruno Giussani's Blog LunchoverIP I learnt of a British author Charles Leadbeater who just has released a first draft of his upcoming book titled "We Think: Why mass creativity is the next big thing" for anyone to read and comment on. Mr. Leadbeater writes in his book:"[...] The irresistible force of collaborative mass innovation is about to meet the immovable object of entrenched corporate organisation. This book is about that coming conflict and what will emerge from it. [...]"And Mr. Bruno Giussani provides a comment as follows: "[...] He has coined the concept of 'Pro-Am' to describe those pursuing activities as amateurs (often unpaid) but setting the same standards as professionals, and has been very influential in shaping our understanding of the developments of the last decade.When it comes to Intellectual Property in general and patents in particular, things get interesting. Mr. Leadbeater writes in his book: "[...] We have come to expect that innovation will come from special people - boffins, geeks, designers, artists - working in special places - labs, garages, studios. They create their inventions and push them down a pipeline to waiting consumers. Every invention has a moment of birth and an inventor who can say, in advance, what their clever gizmo is for. Yet in these new endeavours innovation is the work of multiple authors. It is cumulative, collaborative and often depends on the contributions of intelligent users. It takes place all over, not just in specially designated zones. We expect that innovation will not take place unless people have the financial incentive to be creative. That means they have to be able to patent and protect their intellectual property so they can exploit it commercially. Strong patent protection is the basis for innovation, we are told. Yet in these swirling swarms of creativity innovators share their ideas quite freely and welcome it when others borrow what they have done, to improve upon it. They put a lot of unpaid effort into their innovations and then, bizarrely do not seek to profit from them, nor to control their use. [...]Apparently, Mr. Leadbeater at least expects to run into, if not even having decided to actively foster, a certain development leading to a situation where the individual inventor has disappeared, drowned in the crowd. Moral rights of creators in general and inventors in particular are fruits of modern times. Would it be some sort of exaggeration to say that, in this respect, Mr. Leadbeater effectively adjures to go back to early mediaeval times where artists and inventors were not known by name? Could such movement really be a progress over a world where the individual counts? We should not forget that some sort of assertive individuality of named creatives is still a lighthouse of modern occidental culture. Later in his text Mr. Leadbeater continues: "[...] Proprietary systems for owning and controlling knowledge limit its flow and direct it to where people can pay. That is why so much pharmaceutical research is devoted to diseases of the rich and corpulent and so little to diseases of the poor. In most scientific and cultural fields one person's output becomes another person's inspiration or input. If proprietary controls - such as patents and copyrights - put up the price of inputs, then it will price out of the market some innovators who cannot afford to pay the fee to license access to the knowledge.The alternative to proprietary systems for spreading knowledge and ideas has been international versions of traditional public service broadcasters, often state funded and at times politically motivated. [...]"Such kind of a statement doesn't get better if repeated over and over again but without a sound empirical basis taking into account all relevant facts, not only a selective subset. Pharmaceutical research is utmost expensive and a very bad example in this context. I think that it is virtually impossible to do some "crowdsourcing" of pharmaceutical research on any relevant scale. Mr. Leadbeater further argues: "[...] In this world, not surprisingly the incumbents have sought out new ways to shore up their position. High capital costs no longer provide a sufficiently high barrier to entry. So instead over the past two decades there has been a massive expansion in the coverage of intellectual property, copyrights and patents, to make new forms of social production too costly or too risky. This extension of intellectual property is presented as merely protecting creators against theft. But one motive is protectionist in the economic sense: a rearguard action to protect an incumbent business model against disruptive, low cost competition. All of this will make it much harder for consumers to become producers and participants, to cut, paste, add, amend, share.[...]"This appears to be based on a substrate comprising a lot of conspiracy theory. In this generalisation it is overblown. Surely, mass creativity, FOSS and crowdsourcing have found or will find their niches in the world economy. This is particularly true in areas where activities are feasible without heavy investments. No doubt, the Internet has expanded such areas greatly. But we should be aware to avoid unhealthy over-generalisations.Technorati Tags: Patents
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