Just as a comment for anyone new enough to not remember the historical background:<p>The title is alluding to the famous quote "information wants to be free" by Steward Brand. The full quote famously includes the opposite as well, because information "wants to be expensive because it's so valuable".<p>Kevin Kelly as an early collaborator of Brand of course knows this intimately.<p>There is a wonderful and very insightful book on Brand, by the way, called "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://fredturner.stanford.edu/books/from-counterculture-to-cyberculture/" rel="nofollow">https://fredturner.stanford.edu/books/from-counterculture-to...</a>
I think we should just abolish all patents<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120329153458/https://www.patenthawk.com/blog/2011/08/abolish_patents.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20120329153458/https://www.paten...</a>
> Accept that ideas are low value. If you love the idea, set it free.<p>I disagree. Value of an idea is on a scale too. Some ideas are more obvious than others because the evidence required to evaluate it is more readily available. Therefore, they are not terribly valuable since a lot of people can and do act on them.<p>Some ideas are valuable yet hidden from most because the context to evaluate them properly is not readily available.<p>Some ideas are valuable for some yet unpursuable because of existing systems and ideologies in place (aka Innovator's Dilemma)<p>In short, "ideas are worthless" became a meme but it's extremely distilled. There is a lot more nuance to it
I don't know the solution. I don't know how we determine a better solution.<p>I do know that once you publicly share an idea without somehow copyrighting it, people will run with it and the originator can get badly screwed financially by people talented at essentially intellectual theft and lining their own pockets who have an absence of ethics and are too stupid to see that screwing their source is not in their long-term best interest.
I guess this is already happening in web development, at least, but we’ve seen in operating systems and perhaps everywhere code (GPT-3]<p>And if software eats the world, perhaps it will eat patents, too,