A brief musing on intellectual property
I just read an article on Interesting Engineering about the inventor of the fidget spinner, a small toy held in the hand and spun around a hub to release nervous energy. According to the article, which I won't link to because I don't want to give it the SEO points, the toy is a worldwide hit, but the inventor hasn't profited from it. The article goes so far as to state in its tag line that this is due to her lack of patent on the product:
The woman behind the worldwide phenomenon [ ... ] isn't making a penny from them -- all because she couldn't afford the patent fee.
Now, I'm generally an opponent of intellectual property (IP), since my thoughts on IP conclude that it is far more likely to harm creativity than incentivize it. Initially I was inclined to move on since the article was clearly based on invalid premises, but some small voice of reason in my head said maybe I would benefit from reading it and seeing if I could spot the error.
I quickly diagnosed the tag line to be a direct contradiction with the article, as the article reluctantly points out that she held a patent for more than 8 years, but apparently couldn't sell the product because she couldn't spare $400 to renew said patent. I say it points this out reluctantly because rather than lay this information out directly, they hid it by only saying that the woman who invented the toy did so more than 20 years ago, and lost her patent on it in 2005 when she could not afford to pay a $400 fee to renew it. If it's 2017 and she invented the toy more than 20 years ago, it must have been before 1997, and if she had a patent until 2005, she must have had it for more than 8 years, from '97 to '05, during which time it made her absolutely nothing since she couldn't afford to renew it for $400. If the patent had been in the tiniest degree profitable, she would have gladly dropped the four benjamins to keep the party going.
So possibly the most irrational conclusion possible is that holding the patent for more years would have made her rich, yet this is exactly the article's conclusion (and introduction). This conclusion seems to be an application of the principle, If what you're doing isn't working, keep doing it. Right, obviously it must be an effective strategy; if it weren't, it would be working by now!
Perhaps it's time we dropped that principle. Practice has demonstrated time and time again that intellectual property is not the optimal strategy to reward creativity. It works sometimes for some people, but far more effective models have already been pioneered. I know your school teaches you (without ever directly saying) that IP is the only way to go and any other ideas can be safely ignored. I know your government tells you IP is necessary and civilization would collapse without it (even though civilization was invented without it and, historically, has thrived most successfully in its absence). But none of it is true.
Articles like this may accidentally propagate the very ideas that impoverish the creatives we all (especially opponents of intellectual property) want so much to reward. IP was a bad idea. It's time to lay it to rest. Using IP to reward creativity is like sticking a knife in your foot to fix an ingrown toenail. In theory it's supposed to help, but in practice it just makes the problem worse.
That is all. Thanks for reading!
This post was written for you by @modprobe in the hopes that it makes your day just a bit better. Intellectual property is a lie; use the text of this post however you want, after all, I wrote it for you! If you post it elsewhere, though, you get extra awesome points for mentioning it in a comment here!
In the age of hackers, property theft, etc, we don't even know where ideas originate anymore. Patents benefit big corporations and not inventors.
Hmm... Try putting some blockchain on it. ;-)
Yeah. New technology should serve all of us. But on the other hand we would not have many great inventions if companies were not able to earn back the money that they invested in development. Maybe the solution could be the law which is now used only for medicine patents. Company can patent new pill but after 5 (or 10) years the patent cease to exist and everyone can start making that same pill...
that problem will ends with some projects like this :) :
https://steemit.com/art/@rayandoelimi/are-you-an-artist-or-creator-check-this-is-for-you
Crazy! My daughter was playing with one that looks exactly as pictured and I had never seen these until two days ago!
I saw them in an imported goods store last week for the first time. Haven't tried one yet, though.
@modprobe I heard about the story too. I feel so bad for her. With the boom of shopify in the last years, lots of people make millions with the fidget spinner.
The whole concept of intellectual property is interesting. The whole purpose of it is to claim ownership and distribute it. We want others to have things, but we don't want to be theirs. We want to sell someone the privilege to use things that we want them to use. Paradox?
Interesting. My nephew, a 4th grader, was over last night and had one of those gizmos. Anyway, there are other examples of the situation you cite, where a lone inventor becomes impoverished due to lack of production. Look up the story of intermittent windshield wipers as an example.
But my real question is this - Do you have a sense of how to positively incentavise creativity? In theory, an inventor, author, muse, etc. should be able to reap some reward if a product of their creativitiy is found useful. Particularly in cases where others are profiting from that creation.
I'm with you though, as a purvayor of open source software, I am not so worried about licensing my output as I am about producing what other people want. But this model isn't for everyone. Particularly not for folks inventing useful or novel gadgets and need help manufacturing and bringing them to the market.
Circling back to the little spinny dealies, does the source article state whether or not the inventor tried to license her invention to manufacturers and failed? Or manufactured some and failed to get them to the right market? I wonder why she failed to be successful during the patent period.
I don't want to speculate on the details of why the manufacturer failed to be profitable during those 8 years. I'm not sure anyone other than her has enough information to render such a diagnosis. Like all such stories, it's a complex and unique situation. I can, however, take a step back and see the overall pattern: as is so often the case, people trusted IP to help them get rewarded for their invention, and instead it prevented the invention from helping anyone at all, least of all the inventor. Intellectual property has not yielded a desirable outcome, and it rarely if ever does so, but counterexamples are abundantly available. Literally any other strategy is better than a known bad one. An even worse strategy still teaches more than a known bad one.
But the problem with IP isn't simply that it's a bad strategy. In fact, the problem isn't IP at all. IP is the symptom. The problem is the mindset and goals of the inventor, as evidenced by the use of IP. Why did the inventor create the toy? Was it to get rich, or to (for lack of more specific information, I will say...) make people's lives just a little bit brighter? If her goal was to get rich, her strategy of inventing a toy to get rich is horrible. Inventing widgets is one of the hardest ways to make money. Thus if her goal is to get rich, she failed because her strategy was not designed to realize her goal. To get rich, a better strategy is going into banking. Federal Reserve Notes are monopoly money, so the best way to get them is to be Hasbro, which can print them to its heart's content. :-P
Was her goal then to brighten people's lives? If so, then I think we must agree that she succeeded in her goal, albeit only after pruning the self-destructive strategy of using a patent. If this was her goal, the patent is a strategy directly inimical to her goal, thus it makes sense that she accomplished little until abandoning such a terrible strategy.
Now, of course this still feels incomplete, and indeed it is. We still don't have what we actually wanted. What we actually wanted was for the inventor whose goal was to brighten people's lives, and who succeeded in achieving that goal, to be rewarded for her efforts. But this didn't happen. Why not?
To unravel that knot, we must first consider that one goal of money is to reward such inventors for their work. Money, being a technology, albeit an old one, was invented to serve this purpose (or at least, it's illustrative at present to suppose it was). It is a decentralized reward mechanism which flows from consumers to producers, and inventivizes all to produce more than they consume. The degree to which money flows to a person should parallel the degree to which they produce more than consume. Why doesn't it do this?
Well, that's a very complex problem, which no doubt stems from many bad strategies implemented by inventors and many others. The world has been convinced to adopt a lot of self-destructive strategies, and we are seeing the consequences of those. But in the case of money not reflecting value creation like it should, we need look no further than the strategy represented by the Federal Reserve Notes people have been given to use as money. Those notes are not intended to work as a good money; in fact, quite the opposite, they are designed to implement the abstract interface of money*, while providing a very different result entirely: to transfer economic energy from the users of the money to the printers. In short, if we want our money to start reflecting value creation correctly, we need to stop using this monopoly money that is designed to accomplish something fundamentally different, and even opposite.
Will that solve all of our problems? No, but it will simplify them more dramatically than any of us can predict, and from there it will be much easier to see the next biggest failing strategy.
* For the less computer science inclined among us, this means to look and feel like money to the extent that you can't tell the difference between federal reserve notes and real money in day to day life. But the differences are there behind the scenes, and they have effects that eventually trickle back to you, but by that time it's no longer obvious that the fake money was the cause; all you can see is that you can't buy as much per hour of work as you used to be able to.
Generally speaking if an inventor is good at their job they will receive rewards by being just that: an inventor. If you've only ever invented the hammer and could not think of anything else, then that is where your creativity ends and thus your role as an inventor didn't evolve into a real career to support your community. Just because the hammer is particularly useful doesn't mean you can hoard the idea without direct negative consequence to your entire society. However, if you invent regularly and others find them useful inventions, people will come to you with their problems and you can then negotiate a wage to compensate for the time and effort you will put into solving their problems. Curators do not make a living off of their creations, they make a living off of their ability to create.
Couldn't agree more.
https://steemit.com/anarchy/@mattclarke/i-keep-hearing-how-innovation-will-die-without-ip-laws-so-let-s-look-at-an-example
I know this is gonna sound crazy, but maybe the reason they became so successfully is because they don't have a patent on them, meaning that anyone can make them thereby reducing the price to a worthwhile one. Who would have thought that reducing the costs of production increases the rates of production? Why even have economists if no one listens to them -_-
Great point here and food for thought, thanks! 😀👍
THIS is how it's done my friend ; )
HIGHLY rEsteemed!
Good read! Thanks @modprobe