Intellectual squatting, the fallacy of the origin and the slow painful death of IP
Friday, April 3rd, 2009I’m thinking I should start every blog post from here on out with a pitiful guilt-laden apologetic opening bemoaning my failure to consistently blog YET AGAIN (notwithstanding yesterday’s post). It can kind of be a theme of sorts. I may have actually found my blog title. The failing blogger…another non-blog…ya…maybe I’ll just raise my head stoically, march on and try to do this first thing in the morning from here on out.
So I’ve been thinking a little about how we are often expected to trace the origin of an idea…especially in academic thinking. This idea seems umm….ridiculous perhaps? insane maybe? Its as if an idea were a pillar of a number of neatly stacked bricks creating a nicely defined, clean cut, very traceable origin where each brick built upon the previous. That seems totally delusional to me. What makes up my ideas? Pieces of conversations, the memory of something I read long ago that shaped my thinking whose origin is now long forgotten, an eavesdropped coffee shop comment by the overly pierced leather wearing dude to my left…and that’s only what I am AWARE of! We are constantly being informed by sources we’re not even consciously aware of that our mental models sift and order. Yet despite all we have this notion of property…intellectual property.