Anyone can create a billion dollar company or win a Nobel prize while we're at it. All technically true but largely meaningless for lack of nuance and perspective.
If you're an independent inventor you'll need to hire a patent attorney for your patent to have a meaningful chance, which will run several grand. The patent office is overwhelmed and as a result tends to reject the first draft of an application so that only the most tenacious filers stick around. So you'll spend several grand more on each of probably 3-5 iterations of the application. $10k is a realistic estimate for attorneys' fees if the process goes well.
Then you'll need to monetize it. If you want to sell a product you'll deal with all the other IP holders and their "patent thickets" that intersect with trivial aspects of your product. To sell your product you'll need to license their IP, eroding the value of your own.
Finally you'll have to defend your IP from infringement, which is a major expense---much larger than filing. If you threaten a company with infringement they will make it their strategy to grind you down with legal expenses. If it goes to litigation, you should expect to spend at least several hundred grand.
So overall I would not say just "anyone" has meaningful access to IP. As with many legal/bureaucratic processes, your mileage will vary with how deep your pockets are.
> Anyone can create IP. It's not something only the wealthy can do.
No. First you need privileged access to humanity’s techno-scientific inheritance. New discoveries and their negative research are increasingly being monopolized through trade secret protection (which, unlike patents, means that some discoveries can be forever monopolized).
There are many instances where a small artist sampling commercial music has been slapped with a life-ending lawsuit, while commercial artists straight up ripping off small artists make chart hits and millions of dollars.
> And are you telling us we need privilege to write a song?
I wrote: “you need privileged access to humanity’s techno-scientific inheritance.”
So no, that’s not what I'm telling you.
For cultural media/products it’s different. If the working class need for affordable housing was respected, and we didn’t have parasitic Wall Street housing-financializers like Blackstone sucking out our life energy, then songwriters wouldn’t need to extract endless royalties from cultural products like songs to pay for their housing rents. Instead they could live off live performances or use some sort of societal reputational framework to measure their joy-bringing cultural contribution (e.g. by using the number of plays or similar metrics).
Rent extraction and monopolization of our techno-scientific has a grossly underexplored compounding cancer-like effect on the social organism. Today's property relations (the state letting individuals 'own' bits of science) are literally pushing us towards climate genocide.
I care about growing radical universal access to our techno-scientific inheritance because we live in an age where scientific discoveries, which are all individually part of a larger web of interconnected collective feedback loops revealed when painstakingly reverse engineering various phenomena on our planet, are increasingly being commoditized, with little public awareness of the destructiveness and insidiousness of that shift.
> “…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy
> Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as [trade secrets], patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.“
> Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.”
How does this fit in the context of monetizable, economically valuable IP and the protection of individual intellectual freedom and personal benefit (or lack thereof) for the individual contributor who actually invented it?
Also, technically, as an employee anything you create which even remotely fits into the realm of the employer and the company is transferred to them the moment you create it.
It fits in the context that you can sell a program that you've developed, but other people can't just go and sell it. I don't know why you are focused on inventions when the article's IP was about scholarly articles.
IP in general is easy. IP in specific is anywhere between devilishly hard and trivial, and by its very nature it's monopolistic. You can't "just create your own" if the territory you want to build on is already occupied. By treating all IP as though it's close to impossible, and that we must societally worship the creators and their progeny, we create monumental inefficiencies.
> we must societally worship the creators and their progeny,
It's really hard to have a useful conversation when nonsense like this creeps in. There's no society that behaves as a group. Talk mechanisms, not anthropomorphised outcomes.
Fine: the mechanism is a copyright length of life+70, as a heritable asset. Law is a moral code that's enforced so that as a society we must do, or not do, certain things, so yes, the intent is absolutely that society behaves as a group in certain specific ways.
Again, what's the point in your last statement? You explain your nebulous statement and then sign off as though I'd said your explanation was nonsense.
It sounds as though even a superficial thinking through of mechanisms has stopped you talking about how we worship IP creators, which is great. It's just a mechanism to allow investment in invention to reap rewards before others can compete. You might think that's a bad idea; what's your better idea?
> It's just a mechanism to allow investment in invention to reap rewards before others can compete.
Except it's a lie that the real innovators are those in the private sector, and that they need to recoup their investment through the intellectual property regime. Nearly all discoveries are made through public sector funding. [1] Your worshipping of supposed individual inventors is part of the great man theory adopted by Silicon Valley [2] and which is spouted by Global North and American bourgeois media/stories/movies.
Research and development is a team sport. The lone genius myth will die.
Indeed. This is my new strategy at the place I work, where I can't get acceptance of new interesting "a few years out there" ideas for our product line, but I can file for IP for such ideas. I'm actually encouraged to. It's a great outlet for the creative if you've got the organization to help out.
Not to mention I can't hire lawyers, researchers, illustrators, and all the other things my company does for me. It would cost me so much more, both in dollars and time.
Yep! While yeah I am selling IP for some small bonus, it's way, way easier and a guaranteed return on my investment vs. creating a startup or trying to get someone to license a patent. I've done a few patents now at my current job, and it's literally about 4 hours of investment from me for each one to get the summary written up, talk to the lawyers, and then review their patent draft.
Also, the patent lawyers I worked with had so much domain experience (ML) that it was kinda scary.
Well it depends a lot on the patent, I guess. Some patents are definitely not worth a startup, so probably it's not a bad idea to get some bonus and be done with it.
However it's cool for big companies to show they have thousands of patents.
