Wikinomics blogger Denis Hancock has a hilarious post about the ridiculous state of intellectual property madness in today’s economy. Here’s an excerpt.
In and attempt to fulfill my contractual obligations as a member of the Net Generation, for years I’ve been trying to get my parents to buy something online. While they have “stubbornly” refused for […]

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A few weeks ago two U.S. congressional representatives — Rick Boucher and John Doolittle — proposed legislation to ostensibly protect the fair use rights of consumers in the wake of a sustained attack on these rights by various copyright lobbies. Much discussion ensued.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) predictably complained that the “FAIR USE […]

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My colleague Denis Hancock has a great post on the curious and circular logic of DRM on our Wikinomics blog. Check it out. Abbreviated version below (yes, Denis can be a little long-winded
In February Steve Jobs issued some thoughts on music that were tied mostly to the continued use of DRM. In short, […]

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The Washington Post is reporting today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will soon begin experimenting with a wikinomics approach to reviewing patent applications. Anyone who’s been keeping tabs on the intellectual property system knows that this idea is long overdue.
The number of patent applications has tripled since the 1980s, while the number […]

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The jury has weighed in on the Alcatel-Microsoft case, forcing Microsoft to fork over $1.5 billion to Alcatel for violating two audio patents held by Lucent Technologies (which merged with Alcatel). Ironically, the patents cover standards for converting audio into the open MP3 format that spawned the digital music revolution back in the early 1990s. […]

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Further to the whole Apple-Cisco saga, New Paradigm colleague Paul Barter has an interesting piece in the Financial Post that recounts Apple’s long history of intellectual property snafus. Paul goes back to beginning where Apple ran into trouble with Beatles’ record label over the Apple trademark. He then goes on to discuss Apple’s run-ins […]

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One of the great things about the new business environment is that we’re starting to see a lot of experimentation with different models for organizing creative/commercial endeavors that rest on various degrees of openness, peering, and sharing. The really interesting models are the hybrid ones where project/business leaders manage to blend mass collaboration with a […]

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Having worked with some of the strategy and intellectual property folks at IBM over the past few years I’ve come to regard them as some of the most progressive and thoughtful people on the planet when it comes to rethinking the nature of intellectual property system and fixing the ailing patent system. IBM recently launched […]

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Continuing on the intellectual property theme, news surfaced today that Apple is threatening to sue the folks behind iPhony, a cloned version of Apple’s iPhone user interface that Steve Jobs unveiled a few days ago. The iPhony “skin” provides users who download it with a look-a-like set of icons that they can load on smartphones […]

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In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and I argued that the conventional view of intellectual property is ill suited to an economy where large-scale collaborations are increasingly the norm. Some recent research we’ve been conducting on the Net Generation – the first generation to be socialized in a world of digital communications – has really reinforced that […]

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