Anyone can create IP. It's not something only the wealthy can do.
If you're an independent inventor you'll need to hire a patent attorney for your patent to have a meaningful chance, which will run several grand. The patent office is overwhelmed and as a result tends to reject the first draft of an application so that only the most tenacious filers stick around. So you'll spend several grand more on each of probably 3-5 iterations of the application. $10k is a realistic estimate for attorneys' fees if the process goes well.
Then you'll need to monetize it. If you want to sell a product you'll deal with all the other IP holders and their "patent thickets" that intersect with trivial aspects of your product. To sell your product you'll need to license their IP, eroding the value of your own.
Finally you'll have to defend your IP from infringement, which is a major expense---much larger than filing. If you threaten a company with infringement they will make it their strategy to grind you down with legal expenses. If it goes to litigation, you should expect to spend at least several hundred grand.
So overall I would not say just "anyone" has meaningful access to IP. As with many legal/bureaucratic processes, your mileage will vary with how deep your pockets are.
Here is a book written by two economists on how the current IP regime concentrates power and stifles innovation: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...
No. First you need privileged access to humanity’s techno-scientific inheritance. New discoveries and their negative research are increasingly being monopolized through trade secret protection (which, unlike patents, means that some discoveries can be forever monopolized).
https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-pur...
Yes I agree this isn’t the best source so if you have a good source that explains it better, please share?
And are you telling us we need privilege to write a song?
I wrote: “you need privileged access to humanity’s techno-scientific inheritance.”
So no, that’s not what I'm telling you.
For cultural media/products it’s different. If the working class need for affordable housing was respected, and we didn’t have parasitic Wall Street housing-financializers like Blackstone sucking out our life energy, then songwriters wouldn’t need to extract endless royalties from cultural products like songs to pay for their housing rents. Instead they could live off live performances or use some sort of societal reputational framework to measure their joy-bringing cultural contribution (e.g. by using the number of plays or similar metrics).
Rent extraction and monopolization of our techno-scientific has a grossly underexplored compounding cancer-like effect on the social organism. Today's property relations (the state letting individuals 'own' bits of science) are literally pushing us towards climate genocide.
I care about growing radical universal access to our techno-scientific inheritance because we live in an age where scientific discoveries, which are all individually part of a larger web of interconnected collective feedback loops revealed when painstakingly reverse engineering various phenomena on our planet, are increasingly being commoditized, with little public awareness of the destructiveness and insidiousness of that shift.
> “…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy
> Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as [trade secrets], patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.“
> Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.”
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
The comment you just made is IP that you now own. You just created IP. You own the copyright on anything you write.
Also, technically, as an employee anything you create which even remotely fits into the realm of the employer and the company is transferred to them the moment you create it.
IP in general is easy. IP in specific is anywhere between devilishly hard and trivial, and by its very nature it's monopolistic. You can't "just create your own" if the territory you want to build on is already occupied. By treating all IP as though it's close to impossible, and that we must societally worship the creators and their progeny, we create monumental inefficiencies.
It's really hard to have a useful conversation when nonsense like this creeps in. There's no society that behaves as a group. Talk mechanisms, not anthropomorphised outcomes.
I'm sorry you think that's nonsense.
It sounds as though even a superficial thinking through of mechanisms has stopped you talking about how we worship IP creators, which is great. It's just a mechanism to allow investment in invention to reap rewards before others can compete. You might think that's a bad idea; what's your better idea?
Except it's a lie that the real innovators are those in the private sector, and that they need to recoup their investment through the intellectual property regime. Nearly all discoveries are made through public sector funding. [1] Your worshipping of supposed individual inventors is part of the great man theory adopted by Silicon Valley [2] and which is spouted by Global North and American bourgeois media/stories/movies.
Research and development is a team sport. The lone genius myth will die.
[1] Mariana Mazzucato, https://web.archive.org/web/20160204223931/https://nybooks.c...
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-end...
Also, the patent lawyers I worked with had so much domain experience (ML) that it was kinda scary.
However it's cool for big companies to show they have thousands of patents.