Source link: http://archive.mises.org/17270/open-source-blueprint-for-civilization/
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For international viewers:
http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
That’s really remarkable. I hadn’t fully considered the ways in which IP has distorted the normal patten for shared designs in machines, and yet it must be so. This smashes that model. This looks a bit like the creative commons solutions for texts applied to machinery. Really ingenious.
It’s especially interesting when you consider John Deere Green – that single color’s arguably the company’s biggest asset.
There’s also this: http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
And this: http://www.arduino.cc/
Just YouTubing “reprap” or “arduino” will show many of the cool things that can be done with these open-sourced hardware initiatives.
In a Federalist Society debate in Ohio which I participated in a few months back, http://c4sif.org/2011/03/federalist-society-ip-debate-ohio-state/ , where I debated IP against an IP law professor, in the comments my opponent, one Professor Grant, mentioned that patents stimulate innovation because it forces companies to “design around” existing patents. So if HP has a design on a printer cartridge (itself overly complicated so as to take advantage of the competition-squashing effect of patents — see http://blog.mises.org/13442/leveraging-ip/), then Canon has to have a different design. Thus, you have a proliferation of standards and designs. I observed that this leads to social waste because you have less interoperability than you would otherwise have–if HP printers were popular in a patent-free world, Brother or Canon or someone else could sell compatible cartridges etc., so you could expect to see more common standards in a patent free world.
Amazingly, my opponent then accused me of calling for the government to legislate common standards!
As I am sure that you caught this, but I just couldn’t help but notice the law professor is exposing a variation of the broken window fallacy.
There is no need to ‘design around’ sound designs, but IP forces that. Doing so wastes resources that could otherwise be spent on more productive endeavors. Yes there is a chance that it may accidentally stimulate some sort of break through, but this is not going to usually be the case. It’s just wasted resources.
Sure, you are right. A similar argument is made, I think, when people say the state’s taxes impoversih people so it forces them to work harder and longer and be more productive and be more efficient etc. to overcome or make up for the taxes!
Taxes and “The Subtle Whip” that is inflation
Truly amazing. Hopefully regulators and IP proponents don’t try to kill this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEMkvT0DEk
This is simply amazing! It makes me want to build my own tractor.
Notice that the message behind this concept is pretty much the opposite of the “I pencil” theme, so frequently repeated here, as illustrated in the “homemade” toaster video:
http://blog.mises.org/15328/i-toaster
In contrast with that purposeful failure of a toaster, a failure which was supposed to make a point in favor of the division of labor, these people are actually trying to build useful things by themselves within reasonable limits. Refreshing.
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