Wednesday, June 6, 2007

No trust in intellectual property

While acknowledging that the world tends to view intellectual property as a way to exclude others from trampling on one's rights, Jason suggests an alternative reading:Do IPRs (intellectual property rights) provide a framework for collaboration? Does it in fact act as a catalyst for collaboration rather than an inhibitor? I am not thinking about collaboration in the free software, or open source context necessarily. I am being broader than that. In any situation where two firms, individuals etc. come together to collaborate, it is critical that there is a trust framework in place. That trust may be built upon the rule of law as much as on the personal relationship.This might be possible if we actually knew what IPRs others actually held. But we don't. This was abundantly clear in the Microsoft/Novell Linux pact.