Think Out Loud

There was a time when people believed that knowledge and discovery should be shared. Two companies that had pioneered technology, IBM and Bell Labs, had thousands of patents to their name. Included were things like transistors (those are the elements of a CPU or any solid state physics) and LASER (called MASER originally). They shared all existing patents issued through January 14, 1956 for FREE. Unlimited licenses to anyone and everyone. All future patents they agreed to share for a pittance of cost.

There is a philosophy that nothing is really invented, it is just discovered. Bell Labs didn't invent the solar cell, they just discovered that light hitting a silicon sandwich hit a natural n p n layer and released a flow of electrons (they'd already done that with selenium, but selenium was expensive and didn't generate much electricity). William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain claimed that had they not DISCOVERED the transistor in 1947, somebody else would have because several teams were working on the same semi-conductor physics at that time. The patent idea is sort of like the Puritans saying "We saw Cape Cod first so it belongs to us" to the Italians while the Native Americans are saying "We've been here forever." Both the Native Americans and Italians ended up paying money to Puritans to occupy Cape Cod.

A company's wealth came from innovation. Innovation was defined as "working with a new discovery to create products that were in daily use". Microsoft copied ideas and software from IBM and innovated MS-DOS which they got from Digital Research. Apple copied IBM, Microsoft and XEROX to innovate the Mac. Microsoft copied Apple and IBM and got Windows NT. History is littered with errors of who thought of something first.

Creation isn't making something from nothing; creation is organizing things in a way that is novel and different. How you implement that is innovation and if you do it well it doesn't matter if someone else copies your "invention" as long as you implement it better than anyone else.

Apple didn't invent home computing. Google didn't invent the internet. I have yet to see a media company create anything, they just try to control the source of media. In the past they earned money by innovating and facilitating the dispersion of that media through capture and play technologies. Now their function is to PREVENT the dispersion of that media unless they get paid for it.

If we allow things to continue on their current course, the big companies will hold copyrights and patents on everything that creates a sound and anything that manages a photon. We will have to pay a license fee to think out loud.