Is IP another bubble about to burst? A view from another civilization.

I agree with your opinion100%. This is one of the great posts in recent times I have read. Definitely India can't digest totally closed knowledge.
The current model of trying to "propertize," "privatize" and "commoditize" knowledge comes from a very mercantile, reductionist model of treating knowledge. That may be OK for other countries, which have "intellectual propertized" their knowledge and hold the balance of power in IP Rights, but not for India which has had a long, rich tradition of free knowledge cultures like yoga, ayurveda, mathematics and many other disciplines. It would not be far-fetched to say that many Indian traditions place a moral imperative on sharing knowledge
This is the core of this article.

"In September 2001, Linus Torvalds released..." should read "In September 1991, Linus Torvalds released..." (unless I'm confused).

It is rare to see this kind of insight from an information technology "executive." While you are right--right from a human perspective, not only Indian--the wisdom tradition has long depended on the ravages of an age of selfishness to make wisdom evident and desirable.

Here in the US, the selfishness dominates, and yet it claims that without its greed to innovate, there would be no technological advancements. is there not an element of truth in this? The tension of opposites.

@KaruppuSwamy Thangaraj: Thanks for the appreciation. The paragraph that you highlighted is definitely the core of my article.

@PeniWize: Thanks for pointing the error. Linux was launched in Sept. 1999 and not September 2001. Will have it corrected at the earliest.

@Gary Hottinger: Thanks for the appreciation. I would phrase things a little differently. From my perspective as an Indian, I feel that America's policies are driven by an individualist creed and also a huge emphasis on the private sector. Therefore, America tends to lean heavily towards the privatization of knowledge. (I am not trying to pass a value judgment here; merely trying to understand the forces shaping policy). Societies that are more community oriented probably tend to value knowledge being in the commons rather than private hands. Every society has some knowledge in private hands and some in the commons. The real tension is where do you draw the line between shat should be in the commons and what should be private property. Apart from globalization, I feel that cultural forces play a huge role in how each society draws this line.

Finally, I would agree with you that there is a grain of truth in the statement that, "without its greed to innovate, there would be no technological advancements." However, it is a grain that has been excessively marketed and even mythologized. What percentage of innovation happens because of "greed" is a subject worthy of objective analysis and if you come across such research, feel free to point them out to us.

Personally, I think innovation is more of an inner drive. (I speak here more as an IT person, and I am sure people in the pharma industry would disagree with me, perhaps with valid reasons.)

Great read, thank you.

"In the middle of December 1992 he published version 0.99 using the GNU GPL"

Quoted from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Linux_under_the_GNU_GPL

I cannot disagree more.

A patent is an enticement from government [i.e., a society] to its members to disclose their knowledge about how to make and use inventions. In exchange, the inventor is granted the exclusive right to sell the inventions for 20 years.

Quibble all you want about the quality of patents or even the proper monopoly term, but patent databases compile mountains of commercially useful information that would otherwise be scattered in the ether or not disclosed at all. Those mountains of information can be -- and are -- mined very effectively to advance useful technologies.

You may prefer that the motivation to invent will be the good karma that comes from spending scarce time and money to create and share a useful thing but that is simple childish folly -- what best motivates man is the reward that results from doing work. And that is as it should be.

As for the alleged US penchant for hoarding information, the facts are clearly otherwise. There are countless academic, technical, and industry journals published in the US every week that form the wellspring of a raging river of information. We have too much publicly-available information to digest and manage effectively, not too little.

India has compiled what it calls "its" traditional knowledge in a database that it makes available under a non-disclosure agreement to patent offices around the world as a source of prior art. Two things: if knowledge is meant, as you say, to be shared, why is India claiming this knowledge as its own and why isn't it freely sharing this knowledge with the world?

It doesn't because there is a tradition throughout the world and time of adopting the view that what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours [yours, at least for now]. It is apparently spiritually fine for India -- the country -- to hoard "its" information but not fine for any one individual or company to do so. If there is a reasoned distinction, however, I've yet to hear it.

Capturing knowledge that defines useful things [which is a very, very small subset of "knowledge"] as "property" is a very efficient mechanism to incentivize its creation and to compile that information in a societally beneficial way.

Thanks for this wonderful article. By the way, the Indian values depicted here are more true if we go back to thousands of years.
The only secrets that were closely guarded by Indian sages, seers of the ancient times were the disastrous weapon technology that was equivalent to modern nuclear weapons. Everything else was an open source!

You write: "When the government grants a 20 year monopoly, thus creating 'intellectual property,' it is taking what was previously in the 'knowledge commons' and turning it into private property."

Response: That statement is not only false, it is the false premise upon which your opposition to intellectual property lies.

Bach's concerto's, Shakespeare's sonnets, Picasso's paintings, Rodin's sculptures --- NONE of those works simply existed in whatever is this "knowledge commons" that you so admire. All were created by the combination of money, time, talent, and inspiration and, because of those efforts, all were exclusively owned by their creator -- that is, all were the intellectual property of their creator.

You will say, "Ah, but that is art. The creator of art is entitled to his rewards. No one should be allowed to reproduce a Shakespeare sonnet and call it his own. Shakespeare alone has that right." Of course.

But inventiveness is quite literally the "useful art." Should Edison's work be less protected than Shakespeare's simply because people can use his light bulb but can only read Shakespeare's sonnets? Is that what underlies your abhorrence to intellectual property -- that people desire new material things and therefore have a right to them?

Like Edison's work, extraordinary work has been, and is, being done around the world which constantly breaks new ground in our understanding of our world. The result is NEW knowledge -- not factoids that resides in some ethereal "knowledge commons" that you believe exists somewhere.

When that NEW knowledge is applied to create new products, processes, or plants -- or is used to improve on those that are existing -- then the person who spent his time and talent to create that something new is entitled to own it.

What is your rationale for allowing someone to step in at the end of that creative process and benefit by making the product, using the process, or growing and selling the plant? To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities? Hmm. We've seen how that has played out throughout history.

You write: "By reward, are you implying "financial rewards" or also including the reputation, satisfaction, fun and other intangible rewards that accompany innovation? Read the works of people like Richard Feynman and you realize that the drive to innovate is an intrinsic drive. The propaganda that financial motivation is the biggest motivation has been repeated ad nauseam. If that were the only (or primary motivation) much of open source software would not have existed."

The drive to create is, of course, an inherent part of the human psyche -- and soul. That's obvious.

The question is not WHETHER there will be inventions and artistic works created (by individuals and by collaborations), the question for society is how best to motivate their creation. Rejecting the fact that creators are motivated by financial reward is Pollyanna school girl fantasy. But it's much more than that: it is a rejection of the premise that the creator of the work has the RIGHT to exclusively own the results of his labors. No one else -- and certainly not "society." If you deny that premise that you deny the theory of property.

Read Ayn Rand. As for your suggested readings, there are many folks who share your view that the patent system is fundamentally flawed. And some even believe it rests on a false foundation -- that there simply is no intellectual property. Of course man-made systems can be improved. Which is a silly thing to have to grant because it's obvious but if that helps there you go.

As for there being no intellectual property, just go ahead and make that argument to any inventor or artist and then tell him that you have just as much as he to make his invention or recreate his art and then sell them. That is disgusting.

What a world you live in where what is mine is yours and what is yours is ... well, is it mine? When through your efforts you create the tools and methods that permit the mass market to make 3D images am I going to be allowed to sell them? And call them mine -- because, now that they're made, they reside in the "knowledge commons?"

Your position on intellectual property is fashionable but philosophically bankrupt and socially bad policy.

I find it very interesting to explain "Intelectual Porperty" as a matter of philosophical or theological point of view. I can just add that maybe the origin of it we can find in history as a knowledgebase hid from public in cloisters or else as a power for minority to rule over majority

Some very eloquent and intelligent posts here regarding property law. As a medical professional, I see echoes in this conversation of the great current debate regarding patent law as applied to the discovery of human gene sequences. A short time ago, various parties were working furiously to be the first to claim they had finally mapped the entire human genome. On one side were publicly funded groups who were mandated to publicize their findings as they proceeded. On the other side were privately backed groups who were under no such obligation to publicize anything to anyone except their financial benefactors.

Both sides knew full well what was at stake. If the publicly funded groups (MIT, for example) won the race, the privately funded groups would not be able to license access to their findings. On the other hand, if the privately funded groups won the race, the discovered information would be provided to those prepared to pay for it, and agree to potentially complex terms, thereby discouraging/suffocating much desperately needed development. Note: The privately funded groups did not hesitate to utilize all available research that was pouring out of the efforts of the publicly funded groups.

In the end, the race was declared a tie, essentially resulting in a horse designed by a committee. At this time, the large pharmaceutical companies with enormous resources, who funded their private groups' research, own most of the "patents". One can question the right of anyone to claim ownership of a group of molecules discovered within the human genome. Do your genes belong to someone else? Did these researchers invent these genes? Mind you, these patents are not for processes or technology developed during the race, but simply, and plainly, for the genes themselves.

Not withstanding the arguments people of faith might make about the Creator being the only inventor with a right to claim invention ownership in this case, these appear to be silly questions. However, in the effort to promote and reward those who poured enormous time, effort, and funds into this project, our patent system has apparently answered "yes" to both questions. Some would argue that this is equivalent to someone successfully filing a patent on an individual's fingerprint. But here we are.

The upshot: An enormous amount of urgently needed genetic research is either not being undertaken because of fear of treading on the toes of some unknown party that has laid claim to a group of genes, or in some cases, the research moves forward, painfully slowly, as patent issues (royalties, etc.) are dealt with. Our patent system is intent on making sure the owners of these gene sequences do not go unrewarded for their efforts. To do so might discourage further research leading to similar discoveries.

So without taking a side on this issue (in this forum), this writer would simply ask; who among you has not had their life painfully touched by cancer, or other genetically related diseases? Are you comfortable with this situation? How many of you have children who have been diagnosed with a genetically related terminal disease, only to be told by frustrated providers that a cure is close at hand but at the moment, promising research for this issue is currently tied up in the court system due to patent infringement (property rights) lawsuits?

Do you see some parallels here?

Many of the comments above are interesting and well thought-out but rather overlook the point that IP is not just pure knowledge. It also covers branding and copyright. In fact, MOST IP is connected with things which are not inventions. The problem that I perceive is that too many people are confusing the concept of knowledge with the bread and butter work of implementation.

As it happens, I believe strongly in open source and have created and contributed to several projects, but I also believe that individuals, institutions and corporations have the right to protect their own interests in retaining and controlling the rights to use the results of their labors.

I also think that the writer and others confuse the idea that knowledge should not be restricted with the idea that knowledge is somehow "free". In fact, obtaining knowledge can be very expensive indeed, for example the cost of building something like a super-collider! There's a major difference between placing information in the public domain (something, by the way, that almost no open-source project does) and restricting access to that information by making it private or secret.

If an individual spends months or years creating something of value to you, then you should expect that they need to be reasonably compensated. If you take the product of their hard work from them and disseminate it on the Internet for nothing then you are stealing from them as surely as if you broke into their house and stole the food from their table.

This is an great read.
The same applies to learning Sanskrit.

Sadly, the great Indian tradition of free knowledge was not practised in many celebrated cases. The tribal boy Eklavya (story in Mahabharata, the Indian epic) became proficient in archery drawing inspiration from a person whom he considered to be his guru, the guru, sadly, considered himself to be a teacher to princes only. As part of his teaching fee(irony was that he never imparted any lessons) he asked for the thumb of the boy who gladly gave it and forewent his claim to be the greatest archer of them all. This was an assertion of restriction over knowledge.
The human manifestation of God on the Earth, Lord Ram, cut of the head of a low-born Shambuk because he recited the Vedas, the divine books which were meant for the ears of only the high-born. Same restriction but of a much more drastic kind.
The prescribed punishment for a low-born who heard the sound of the Vedas was to have molten lead poured into his/her ears.
As such, while free access to knowledge was a normative assertion in ancient India, it was not really translated into an existential reality. With lack of codified system of justice, a common law system that relied on the wisdom (or lack of it) of the local potentate was not really the best place to seek free access to knowledge.
Yet, this does not detract from the fact that indeed it was considered the highest form of charity to give knowledge freely. But charity counts for something only in the other world. This one is the material world where prosperity is what is desirable.

Buddhism is full of examples of gurus withholding knowledge. The justification, however, is that they are going to impart "wisdom" as opposed to knowledge, and that this wisdom can naturally only be gained through sacrifice of the ego (which of course often translates to the students' time/money) to others.

Then again, open source software is a bit like these 'secret' teachings of eastern religion -- in principle available to anyone with the desire and motivation to learn, but not without a great investment of energy and openness. Linux is freely available, but beyond the grasp of those without the dedication to understand it or participate in the open model.

Generosity creates wealth. Actively intending to limit the distribution of open source software to certain countries will increase poverty in the US and around the world.

"The best anti-poverty program around is a world class education".

And we would intend to deny certain countries the world-class education that open source provides? We are going to invest in restrictions? It is counter-productive to spend time building restrictions to knowledge that is self-secret, and should be left available to anyone smart enough to participate.