The Hindu Business Line : IP rights

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Michael Tiemann

Red Hat India and IIT Delhi recently organised a knowledge symposium titled `Owning the Future: Ideas and their role in the digital age.' The event sought to examine intellectual `property' in the context of traditional knowledge, globalisation and the growth of the open source movement worldwide.

eWorld sounded out two visiting dignitaries at the symposium, Prof Paul Jones from the University of North Carolina and founder of Ibiblio (ibiblio is one of the oldest WWW Internet Web sites and a large conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies) and Michael Tiemann, President, Open Source Initiative and Vice-President, Open Source Affairs, Red Hat India, on this question: What is the relevance of IP rights to the layman — not a scientist or an IT bureaucrat?

Here is their take:

Paul Jones

Paul Jones of ibiblio says, "Every layman has an investment in IP and in innovation. Not just an upstream investment that provides reduced costs of products and increased speed of innovation, but — as Eric von Hippel details in his 2005 MIT Pressbook `Democratizing Innovation' — every purchaser is a potential innovator, a part of the final and unpredictable design and redesign of products.

You want to be able to use the hammer you just bought to crack nuts as well as pound nails. You want to add features to your car or to a skateboard. You also want to add to software, to electronics and to other products and images in ways that the original designer could not have possibly anticipated. Without legal access to the means of innovation, your choices are reduced or even erased."

Jones cites Thomas Jefferson's letter to Isaac McPherson in 1813. The letter says, "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Property vs heritage

Michael Tiemann of Red Hat India says, "To me the question is where to draw the line between property and heritage.

"In the US today, the song `Happy Birthday To You' may not legally be sung at birthday parties — is this a correct protection of property (in which case every child, ages 2-6, is becoming a trained criminal) or an improper violation of cultural, family, and personal heritage? The problem of property vs heritage is not always clear to the layman thinking only of themselves, but the layman raising a family is in constant jeopardy: where is the line between sharing culture with one's family and conspiracy to commit theft?" He further says, "If the layman's answer is `they're never going to catch me,' then that, not the artifacts the layman claims as his culture, becomes the culture."

Tiemann says, "I worry every day that childhood itself has become so commercialised and so proprietary that I cannot legally take the photos of my daughter that my mother took of me — not because my daughter is not a son, but because the concept of fair use has been crowded out by so many property claimants."

He leaves the reader with a poser: "There is a quote on a sticker that my wife affixed to our bathroom mirror: `Most of my ideas belonged to people who never bothered to develop them.' Whether ideas exist in air or not, the key question is this: who has the right to develop them?" he asks.

preethij@thehindu.co.in