Paying for learning
The logic for protecting intellectual property is that developers deserve to recover development cost -- maybe get rich. But our age of unabashed file sharing is starting to make this unenforceable. In Compression innovation has to become so routine that this premise has to be rethought.
The unwanted effects of buying patents and sitting on them, or using them to collect royalties is illustrated by George Seldon's century-old patent on the automobile. Seldon wanted to collect on every vehicle sold, of course. Henry Ford recognized that this was an big impediment to a mass market for cars and in 1911 legally challenged the patent as too broad -- and won.
Today, we frequently refer to a "marketplace of ideas." At first, the internet seems to be an open bazaar. We are upset if a government restricts access and e-mail, in whole or in part. However, the structure of search engines and ad-sponsored sites herd crowds in their direction. Internet does not consist of equal opportunity landing pages. What are the unwanted effects of this?
Information is not free. A great deal of human and generated energy goes into creating and propagating it. At their present rate of growth, servers alone consume a significant and increasing slice of electrical power demand. GNP figures and most company accounts capture only a few figments of this operational cost. Eventually some of them percolate into the promotional budgets of organizations sponsoring sites to generate revenue.