May 21 2008 / by Alvis
Category: Government Year: General Rating: 11 Hot
Mike Masnick at Tech Dirt has a great
piece up about the concept of idea redundancy in which he
responds to a conflicted Malcom Gladwell
article that praises Nathan
Mhyrvold idea-tank company Intellectual
Ventures, which makes money by conceiving and patenting
hundreds of ideas, while at the same time noting that ideas are
likely to pop up simultaneously in different brains. 
Whereas Gladwell writes that, “Good ideas are out there for
anyone with the wit and the will to find them, which is how a group
of people can sit down to dinner, put their minds to it, and end up
with eight single-spaced pages of ideas,” Masnick critiques that
“if these ideas are the natural progression, almost guaranteed to
be discovered by someone sooner or later, why do we give a monopoly
on these ideas to a single discoverer?”
Being a bit of an idea junkie myself, I have often contemplated
the notions of idea formation, attribution, ownership and
profitability, both from an individual and social context.
Fundamentally, I agree with Masnick’s argument that “in giving
monopoly rights to Myhrvold and his friends [in addition to
gigantic corporate actors, universities and other patent trolls],
we make it much more difficult for others (even those who
discovered the same things totally independently) to help actually
make them useful.” That being said, I also realize that the patent
system that we currently have was and is needed to protect the
rights of inventors and encourages many people to invest time into
the innovation of concepts.
From a broader systems context, it seems to me we should be
striving to find the “sweet spot” for social progress. This entails
using the most cost-effective means to most accurately attribute
ideas to their rightful creators (whether those be multiple
individuals, social groups, long historical chains thinkers, or
even biological systems themselves), while ensuring that they
benefit us in the short-term and long-term through 1) their
execution and diffusion, and 2) by profiting the creators
appropriately to raise their standard of living and encourage
additional innovation directly at the source. (cont.)
Fortunately, the evolving web and the freeing-up of human minds
for abstract thinking have resulted in what Creative
Commons founder Lawrence Lessig
describes as an innovation commons that
appears to be on the verge of catalyzing a new low-cost, reliable,
“2.0” patent system.
Most importantly, in addition to fostering an explosion of new
innovation through connectivity, the web is evolving into a
historical record of innovation and idea flow. As information
storage steadily gets cheaper, new websites organize and structure
volumes of data, semantic and AI technologies evolve, and increases
in computer processing speeds allow for more rapid search, it
becomes much easier to retro-actively
quantify when, where and how certain ideas came to be. This has
already disrupted numerous patents as lawyers are now able to point
to pre-existing or simultaneously occurring innovations. Still,
establishing this requires a significant legal investment which
ultimately favors larger actors.
At the same time new social media, or Web 2.0, structures such
as the next iterations of Idea Spigit and
Innovation Exchange appear
poised (my bet is within 2-3 years) to enable widespread
micro-innovation by rewarding participants with participation,
legal representation or even direct income (probably by sharing ad
revenue in a manner similar to Google Knol) in exchange
for depositing your ideas.
As the web continues to evolve, new Idea 2.0 structures are
invented and people become more accustomed to publicly recording
their innovations in real-time, it’s clear that a new patent system
will have to emerge to accommodate the more accurate simulation of
human innovation. Even though the U.S. Patent Office itself is
going digital, supported by patent powerhouses like IBM, I think it’s most likely the solution will come
from the ranks of idea-related start-ups that understand how to
best integrate social networks with new semantic and AI
technologies rather than any top-down extension of the existing
system. When this new system is invented (or finally becomes
efficient enough) most of us will agree that it is more fair and
that it decreases the occurrence of Innovation Attribution Errors
and high-cost New Idea Redundancy.
Of course, it’s also possible that a variety of different idea
systems will arise and that different nations, generations and/or
demographics will adopt the ones that benefit them most. Such a
future could see countries like the U.S. or a United Europe
resisting until the latest possible moment.
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