'Megaupload is just the latest corporation to feel the brutality of early 21st century state-run justice. The point, of course, (in our view) is not actually to provide “justice” so much as to make people fearful of using the Internet and sharing information that may someday be deemed “criminal.” In fact, copyright laws were developed by royalty to counteract the spread of information (in books) after the invention of the Gutenberg Press. The same tactics that applied then are being applied now. But we have long argued that as entrenched as the dominant social theme is, it will come under increasing scrutiny as what we call the Internet Reformation proceeds. Just as the state’s other memes are coming under question – the fear-based promotions that frighten middle classes into giving wealth and power to global repositories – so the “state-justice” meme shall come under fire, sooner or later. In fact, we would argue the battle has already been joined on this issue of copyright infringement. We’ve also enunciated a practical perspective that we believe would resolve the issue in a pertinent and appropriate way. Let those who are OFFENDED by copyright infringement enforce their copyright themselves! Let them use their OWN assets to enforce their position.'

'As we've made it easier for ideas to spread digitally, we've actually amplified the gap between free and paid. It turns out that there's a huge cohort that's just not going to pay for anything if they can possibly avoid it. As the free-only cohort grows, people start to feel foolish when they pay for something when the free substitute is easily available and perhaps more convenient. Think about that – buying things now makes some people feel foolish. This new default to free means that people with something to sell are going to have to push ever harder to invent things that can't possibly have a free substitute. Patronage, live events, membership, the benefits of connection – all of these things are outside the scope we used to associate with the creative business model, but that's changing, fast. ... Most ideas have never been something one could monetize.'

'Open source is a really interesting twist in the midst of all this. Software businesses with profit margins greater than the current Treasury yield hate open source because it mostly eliminates rents. Forkability is a rent vaccine, so open source "products" tend to be sold or serviced at just about their producer's opportunity cost. In the case of community based software, it is by definition at opportunity cost, but that cost is as likely to be paid in reputation as in dollars -- making this a conversation on sociology and psychology rather than economics. In any case, open source software is a leverage-less wasteland from the point of view of anyone that has an MBA. Or, it's a wonderfully rich source of innovation for the people that never liked having rent forcibly extracted. ...rent holders who are losing always ..: try to influence the law to make their rents more permanent. ... through lobbying, aggressive (and abusive) patent strategies...'

'...the more that people can get back to individual problem solving with or without third-party negotiators the better off civil society will be. We would argue that people have a right to enforce private copyright and patent claims IF THEY CAN. Ultimately we would suggest that people have a right to try to attach invisible strings to their IP. Who is to stop them after all? The enforcement, within the framework we are suggesting, would amount to a kind of intense market competition. Reducing, or even eliminating, the resources and involvement of the state in judicial and civil matters as much as possible, would put the onus of enforcement on the individual. Much of what passes for "justice" today might suddenly be seen as too expensive to insist upon, once it was up to the individual. For us, issues of private justice, a return to common law and even pre-common law problem solving, even regarding so-called criminal issues, is part of creating a freer and more market-oriented society.'

'When it comes to copyright, we would argue for private justice... If someone wants to sue an individual or group for "stealing" intellectual property, the person should be able to do so. But there is no need for state laws or international treaties regarding the matter. ... This would mean that only very large commercial enterprises would end up being sued. Nobody would bother with individuals downloading files, etc. This is probably as it should be. Legal injury should follow natural law. What is "yours" is mostly what you can protect: your family, your property, etc. But launch a book or article into the world and protecting it becomes a good deal more arbitrary and difficult. We would argue that successful artists can still make a living even were intellectual property rights enforced privately rather than through statist mechanisms. Sure, it would be a less efficient and merciless system. People would pilfer songs and articles and even books. But so what? They do it anyway.'

'The technological advantages of sharing information point us to an important praxeological principle that also explains the nonviolence of this black market. Unlike the goods people exchange money for, information is nonscarce. Being nonscarce, it is a nonrivalrous good and, as such, it is free. In fact, as Rothbard points out, nonscarce goods cannot even be economized—that is, they cannot be made the object of human action. ...the black market in information is simply individuals cooperating in order to manipulate their own private property—namely, altering the physical state of their computers in certain patterns. We term these patterns "songs," "movies," and the like, informally treating them like physical objects. But at no point does copying a pattern inhibit anyone else's ability to enjoy that same pattern. It turns out that copying is not theft. Unfortunately, the state will not—to use a cliché—let information be free. But can legislation alter the laws of the universe?'

'[Judge Robert] Sweet said he invalidated the patents because DNA's existence in an isolated form does not alter the fundamental quality of DNA as it exists in the body nor the information it encodes. He rejected arguments that it was acceptable to grant patents on DNA sequences as long as they are claimed in the form of "isolated DNA." The ruling that could invalidate patents held on almost 20 percent of the human genome. There is a long-simmering debate within the biotech and scientific communities over whether it makes sense to patent genes. At this point, most scientists agree that patents on genes retard scientific innovation. When companies request a huge fee for somebody to develop medicines related to genes they own, it can cause real harm to people and researchers who can't afford the pharmaceutical companies' asking prices.'

'Google, by implying that Beijing had sponsored the attack, has placed itself in the center of an international controversy, exposing what appears to be a state-sponsored corporate espionage campaign that compromised more than 30 technology, financial and media companies, most of them global Fortune 500 enterprises. The U.S. government is taking the attack seriously. Late Tuesday, the U.S. Secretary of State, released a statement asking the Chinese government to explain itself, saying that Google's allegations "raise very serious concerns and questions." -- [China] has been taking steps to spur innovation within its borders, pressuring multinational companies to build research labs in China and developing the talent to eventually replace these businesses with indigenous competitors. "If you're having trouble [innovating] or if you want to prime the pump, the best way is to go out and steal cutting-edge IP."'

'Quoting Eric Reasons: "Every business model relying on intellectual property law (patent and copyright) is heading for massive deflation in our lifetimes. We've seen it with the music industry and newspapers already. The software industry is starting to feel it with the maturity of open source software, and the migration of applications to the cloud. Television, movies, and books are next. I've come to question the ability of copyright and patent law to foster innovation, but leaving that aside, the willingness of people to collaborate and share, and the tools provided for it on the internet, may render these laws obsolete. Why is deflation a better descriptor? Because as businesses whose product is reliant on intellectual property shrink due to Internet-based efficiencies, consumers are reaping the rewards of these efficiencies." -- ...when you're dealing with what I've been calling "infinite goods" you can have a multiplicative impact on the market.'

"The whole system relies on confidence. That confidence relies on the belief that the banks have invested the money that they hold wisely, and that the value of the assets that they hold has retained sufficient value for the money deposited to be returned. The good side of the system is that it allows for rapid economic expansion, but the downside is that there is a fragility, and that the fragility is built upon the foundations of the system - confidence. The whole system is no more real than the confidence in the Linden Dollar, and the economy of the world is no more real than the economy of Second Life. It is all built upon belief in the value of currencies that have no real value, except what we subjectively give them."

"Why let all of your ideas die with you? Current Copyright law prevents anyone from building upon your creativity for 70 years after your death. Live on in collaboration with others. Make an intellectual property donation. By donating your IP into the public domain you will "promote the progress of science and useful arts" (U.S. Constitution). Ensure that your creativity will live on after you are gone, make a donation today."

"01. There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction."

"... that’s where the MMO industry is going, a seamless experience between the web, between wikis that have information about the game... the wiki communities never sleep. They’re more passionate about information being correct than the developers."

"Linden Lab allows you to keep the IP (copyright) of the art you create, the scripts you write, or the textures you upload. They do not grant you ownership of the objects in the world (which can be deleted at their discretion)" -- Nice clarifation

Comment: "Either it will be an immutable theme park for hawking their and their sponsors' products, or it will allow user-generated content and rapidly descend into an IP police state." -- IP Police State. Brilliant!

"People happily pay for content in certain Internet ecosystems, provided the ecosystems are delightful. People love paying for virtual art, clothing and other items in virtual worlds like Second Life, for instance."

"uWorld is a Matrix-kind World with NHCI(Natural Human Computer Interaction). uWorld gives them an opportunity to reincarnate themselves in this fascinating virtual world, and accomplish the life goals that they’ve been dreaming of all the time."

Wieden & Kennedy objectives for 2007, number 9: “Create our own content and start to create new models for making money from our own content.”

"#1 Become a Member to buy ideas #2 Hold a pitch for ideas or find ideas in the Gallery #3 Select ideas and license them." "Licences can be for either 12 months or for perpetuity and cover a single territory, multiple territories or the world."

"Agencies should create and give away products that enhance people's lives, compliment our client's products and therefore inspire consumers to purchase them." for a share of IP?

"Own It offers free intellectual property advice for London's creative people. We offer a range of services, from basic to specialist support, through online and face-to face seminars, workshops and surgeries with intellectual property lawyers."

Comment: "Every agency should have a mutual NDA signed at the beginning of a pitch that includes language that precludes the client from using ANY of the ideas, research, media concepts or creative executions without proper compensation"

'“The general rule is that ideas are free unless strapped down by contract or patent.” In practice, a great idea is owned by whoever expresses that idea most successfully.'

"At a time when people are constantly asking “what’s in it for me?”, isn’t it blatantly obvious that the best way to engage someone is to be useful to them?"

"Anomaly is not driven to make ads, it is driven to solve business problems. And who is the best person that can solve a business problem? The answer is everyone and anyone."

"That's something I've been feeling is the best way for our industry to progress. If the goal is help sell a product, then we need to be right at the top or from the conception." (Read the full post for more)

"I had no idea how involved they would get in the process," says Virgin's Kramer. "They're in it to share risk. They've become a business partner."

"Agencies have no incentive to produce amazing results, so they'll extend the project as long as possible because it's all billable hours. But Anomaly has an incentive to do great work. They have the same skin in the game that we do."

"Anomaly, a two-year-old startup, brought a pitch that sounded more like a takeover bid" -- "Here's a look at what separates Anomaly from the rest of the pack. #1. Creative compensation #2. Product design #3. Mobile marketing platform"

"There’s a good reason [Anomaly] is on everyone’s lips..Think about it: in 2006, Anomaly clocked revenues around $15 million. So… they get bigger (double the dollars of intake) and then make cents off of 80% of their business? We gotta get in there"

"Rather than work on a commission basis for creating ads, the agency will just as often eschew commercials and create concepts such as a brand name, licensing a product or designing packaging, and look to take royalties."

"We've declined 40 pitches, and we're getting a stream of entrepreneurial ideas most of which we are turning down...This gives us more partners to say 'do you fancy this? Do we fancy this?'"

"If they liked the idea they would pay for it – and that they would decide how much the idea was worth and if they didn’t want to buy the idea, well he would post it on his blog for all the world to see." (Under Creative Commons? All ideas? Brave.)

George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

"Wikipedia is premised on a contrary theory of truth that would have seemed familiar to George Orwell: if the crowd says that two plus two equals five, then two plus two really does equal five."

died

"If we think of online media in terms of the public sphere we can see that it has very quickly become 'mallefied', that is public debate has moved, just like the town square to the shopping centre, to a privatised and commercialised space."

"What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality."

"AttentionTrust is a not-for-profit organization that puts the user in control of their Attention data. Until now, only companies on the other side of our clicking captured the value - Our Attention data has real value and needs to be protected."

"Bowie Bonds are asset-backed securities of current and future revenues of the first 25 albums of David Bowie's collection recorded before 1990. Issued by David Bowie in 1997, they were bought for $55 million by the Prudential Insurance Company."

"Self-aware agents [may] not know that they are in a sim, in which case perhaps some argument could be made that it is all right that they do not know since in fact we cannot prove that we are not in a sim ourselves."

Rather important, don't you think?

Love it! "We are a new kind of black market. We allow advertisers to purchase actions on social networks, and we pay social network users to perform those actions."

'"The question is: Do the non-negotiable contracts that let you participate and buy things in games, do they trump any possible property interest you might acquire in the game?"'

"Second Life is a place where expressing luxury is problematic. All real-world luxury brands have at the end of the Second Life day is a name. Some resident brands are more powerful than out-world brands."

"Second Life [has] a crafting economy based on creating and exchanging virtual objects... these objects are artificially scarce... the ability of these objects to propagate freely throughout the world is limited only by the software that supports them."

Digital humans: "Property rights no longer pertain to physical objects but control over one's source code and ideas -Competition for scarce resources becomes over computing resources to run one's digital self rather than over money, foodstuffs and energy"

"If iTunes had existed in his time, what jazz aficionado wouldn’t want to know what songs were on John Coltrane’s playlist?... Similarly, if Flickr had been around, what artist wouldn’t be interested in seeing Picasso’s Flickr portfolio?"

"What's the perfect reputation system? Perhaps, one in which you can move your persona from one web site to another, with different data stores and key spaces (say, your copy, that of others and a shared version)."

".. this leverage can go on to redefine the business models of players along the value chain - in Google's favour... forcing a rights shift upon players with largely obsolete business models, built on older, hugely inefficient kinds of property rights. "