Some time ago I watched a video called ‘Tidying Up Art’. A Swiss artist disassembled famous artworks into shapes and elements, then re-arranged the pieces by color into tidy ‘piles’ on the canvas.
The idea had all of the makings of a potentially viral art trend; amusing to a wide audience, visually pleasing, and easy enough to be replicated by anyone. It could have been a great idea. But the artist himself killed it in its infancy. He patented it.
“Art is theft,” Picasso used to say. And not only art, all great ideas are born in the flow of information. They are the cross-links of other information networks. In fact, Steve Jobs quoted Picasso when he famously admitted how Apple gets their best ideas. “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and bringing those things into your work. Picasso had a saying, “good artists copy; great artists steal”. And we [at Apple] have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” Of course, this quote is juxtaposed ironically against the recent Apple vs. Samsung legal battle (in which Apple accused Samsung of patent infringement, and which Apple ended up losing). This is, however, the traditional corporate view on sharing ideas and knowledge. Everybody wants to gain it from others, while nobody wants to give it away. The logic is, if I hoard more knowledge than my competitors, I will have an advantage over them and hence make more money. There used to be a time when an inventor could patent a bread-storage box and then live off of the profits of his invention for the rest of his life. That is no longer the case. With the free flow of information through the internet, combined with complicated and varying patent laws around the world, similar (but not exact) bread-storage boxes would likely start appearing globally. While the inventor would be busy with patent lawsuits, someone would invent a better bread-storage box, and everyone would move on to the new technology.
The high disposability of modern technology means that it’s much more difficult for inventors to make money off of patents. David K. Levine, co-author of Against Intellectual Property, explains “Most patents are not acquired by innovators hoping to protect their innovations from competitors, but by large corporations for defense purposes, to prevent other people from suing them over patent violations.” Levine and his colleague Michele Boldrin believe that the time is ripe for patents to disappear altogether, and for industries to take on new models of money-making which do not hinder the diffusion of innovation.
There are, after all, plenty of industries that hardly use patents at all, such as clothing, food, and furniture industries. These industries not only survive creative ‘theft’, they thrive on it and often bring in higher gross sales than most traditional patent-infused industries. And if companies are hell-bent on making profit in the modern economy, they should pour their resources into adjusting to it, rather than trying to revert it to the old model.
Olga Motsyk
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