Avoiding the Simple Binary

As promised some time before I fell into a personal black hole I'm starting to view Subbable's "Crash Course: Intellectual Property series. Here is episode 1, Introduction.

Subbable was bought by Patreon and like other such creative endeavors if you like this stuff and want to see more of it, you can pay what you think it's worth through their system. With that in mind, how's the intro?

Good, really. Like a lot of complex topics, Crash Course tackles intellectual property by breaking it into chunks - I'll review future episodes in other blog posts. This one is about ten minutes long and it starts off with the classically misquoted Stuart Brand epigram that information wants to be free, promising to avoid the simple binary of advancing technology versus encroaching legal regimes. Instead, they appear to want to promote a "both and" style, where we all agree that technology makes copying easier, understanding intellectual property harder, and at the same time gives us access to vast new worlds of creative output, whose creators need to be rewarded. Which is to say, paid.

The video notes that intellectual property in fact pervades modern first-world technological existence but like good design most of the time we're not aware of it. We become aware of it only when we're being told "no" and that's usually a rude awakening. It's irritating and often irrational; it's used to protect broken business models - all the things we've discussed here. But it also promises to avoid simply cataloging the brokenness and focus on what actually works with copyright, patents, and trademarks. We shall see.