Against intellectual property

This essay written by Brian Martin offers very strong view on intellectual property and sets many though-provoking ideas, which I have never thought through before. Martin´s aim is quite simple: No intellectual products should be owned by individuals, corporations, governments or any communities as a common property.

His reasons are basically three: Intellectual property retards innovation, exploits Third World countries and makes profit to only a few huge corporations and strongest governments. All in all, intellectual property doesn’t fulfill its purpose and should be replaced by free use and sharing. For instance, alternative to copyright could be shareright. You may reproduce this material if your recipients may also reproduce it.

Scientists, freelancers’ writers and similar professions should be paid not by royalties, but rather from some foundation or other sources, because royalties and patents don’t offer them big amount of money anyway – most of all money goes to corporations who own rights. Moreover, similar to Himanen and his Hacker Ethic concept, Martin suppose the biggest
Satisfaction for these people is their work itself and recognition by their peers.

Even if this is true (or true for most of cases), I can´t imagine reorganization of the economic system. I agree that the system is nowadays set up unequal and advantages the powerful and weaken the poor. But according to this, I can´t see any power, which can defeat this enormous lobby. More I believe in gradational shortening of patent and royalties duration or giving more money to creators. Unfortunately, even I like this brave idea very much, the general trend is not going in this way. May be, there are scissors: many people, especially web community, are fighting against the intellectual property and behave in opposite way, but the corporations are striking hard – for example the case with genetic information. I am very curious, how this big bang will finally happen.

Btw, there is another question in my mind – the amount of passionate inventors, would it be bigger than researchers and scholar, freelance writers and artist, who will change their job, because they are doing it for money? Would this intellectual property canceling really start boom of creativity and innovation? Who knows, may be Brian.