The Patent system is slow, static, and expensive. Sure it’s great for corporations and wealthy institutions, but what about the rest of us? How do we get paid for our intellectual property? We make rapid fire decisions every day that can make or break markets – who’s got time to patent?
Or maybe the last thing that Wall Street wants is for Engineers, Architects, designers, and creative people to get “royalties” on their work. That is What Wall Street does, they collect the royalties of the creative people in America….until now. Social media is a social contract, IP is our currency.
The following commentary was posted last week in Wall Street Journal Op Ed. This is an opportunity to consider the term “Conversational Currency” at it’s most literal meaning. People pay money to talk to each other. Other people want to control how when and how much people can talk to each other. The battlefront is technology, like rockem-sockem robots, technologies duke it out in this trillion dollar struggle to control our conversations.
Who benefits … shareholders?
The irony is that each and every titan is the beneficiary of conversation. The 135 year old Alexander Graham Bell era is about to End. Will patricide or scionism prevail? Will unified voice systems integrate all mediums and devices into a single channel? Will the elimination of conversation “frictions” also eliminate innovation “frictions” (you know, all those things that make innovation impossible to capitalize by regular people; Patents, risk, velocity, market intel, 1000% VC, etc.).
It’s about the data, stupid
Mr. Kessler proposes a National Data policy – after all, voice, text, video, etc., are simply different forms of data and should be treated as such. Any device should work on any network and data should flow freely. What’s with owning airwaves? Who came up with that idea ? – it creates more interference than it is touted to solve. Ditto for exclusivity contracts – who needs them, except those who stifle innovation. And finally, the mother of all frictions, restricting speed and bandwidth. Sure, I like driving with the emergency brake on – it improves my eligibility for “cash for clunkers”.
Resistance is futile
The truth cannot be hidden by economic tyranny. Noble institutions like journalism, education, and entrepreneurship are being sacrificed in the name of shareholder value. People communicate freely and freely they shall communicate. These are the profound questions of our era that play out every day in the news. Please read this and our other posts at CC with great optimism that a new paradigm is arising where an innovation economy will be built on a social media platform outside the construct of corporations:
The Ingenesist Project posits that trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of value that is being transferred to social media from a legacy economy stifled by insurmountable debt. These numbers are indeed spectacular because they account for the value “lost”, and most importantly, the calculations provides clues on how to “find” it again.
The Innovation Economy will not be delivered by corporations, Government or Academia. There no single person, country, ideology, or philosophy that can meet the challenges of the future alone – everyone will be required to participate because everyone has a stake in the outcome.
Many years ago, economists from the industrial revolution identified three variables (productive inputs) for building industries; Land, Labor, and Capital. The rate of output was related to how these inputs were combined. If any of these factors of production were missing, the other two had little or no utility for production. The concept of Land, [...]
We have established that Innovation and wealth creation are profoundly related and that one cannot be sustained without the other. A huge problem is becoming apparent because Money lives in a complex, global and highly integrated system where billions of dollars can circle the globe daily at the speed of light. Meanwhile, innovation does not [...]
Innovation clusters are all the rage in regional economic development circles. Actually, they are “industrial clusters” because several companies in similar industries collocate in the same geographical area. The industrial cluster then attracts supporting industry and often causes the migration of educated and motivated people to the prospect of jobs. I suspect the ‘innovation’ moniker [...]
INGENESIST PROJECT: Submission to the 10^100 Innovation Contest; www.project10tothe100.com Single sentence: The Ingenesist Project is an open source economic development program to induce the Innovation Economy utilizing Social Networks. Tell us more (300 words) The current financial system has reached the limits of its effectiveness. Interest on debt has exceeded the system’s ability to pay [...]
Social Network will become the corporate structure of the future. They will spit out start-ups at an astonishing rate. The “resume system” will be banished forever possibly earning the title of the cruelest human invention since the lobotomy. The University System will be challenged – the relevance of the college degree will be questioned in [...]
With a computer readable knowledge inventory, local communities of practice, a percentile search engine algorithm, and the virtuous circle of finance, then future innovation cash flows can be predicted much more accurately and with far lower risk than with, say, the venture capitalists acting alone. Were risk is predictable, cash flows are predictable and the [...]
Today there is a big scare that bad people will run off with your intellectual property and make a ton of money with it. Another problem is that the Patent system is so slow and so expensive that the vast majority of innovators simply do not have access to patent protection – many people just [...]