Taking the Plunge: into the Commons of Ideas & Invention

Hyper-convergence paradigm, Intellectual Property Preserve ::

The digital age has brought the most potent test for the security of intellectual property, and thanks to the open source movement, has also shown that intellectual property is not always most productive or most valuable when kept under wraps. Increasing numbers of large firms and institutions are opting not only to use open source software —to avoid licensing fees—, but are also building their own products and services with open source code, meaning they cannot keep the contents safely secret.

What is being bought with the sacrifice of patentability or copyright protection is speed of innovation and the right to use the ideas of a vast community of researchers, programmers and hobbyists. Collaborative innovation, community-based research and commons licensing, are some of the key elements to this complicated new terrain of creative work and the dissemination of ideas. Optimizing our access to and enjoyment of these various elements of the 21st century creative economy will best enable us to achieve bold innovations and establish a broad community of interested people.

Code, research, enterprise and market penetration are all being democratized. The key to succeeding as a society, as a creative sector of economic output, will be ensuring that the best aspects of the open computing environment can be applied in the most pliable, useful way to the largest number of people’s interests, without compromising the creative structure itself. What will replace copyright and royalties is not clear, but the most likely form of compensation will be a blend of the copyright and the open source standards.

HotSpring hopes to create, by way of its standard discussion-forum interface, an intellectual property preserve, wherein new ideas not only emerge and can be improved and allowed to flourish, but where they are also recorded, labeled, given both semantic flexibility and ownership by those who do the most to promote or improve them. This standard for managing material contributions to our innovation- and productivity-oriented discussion forum, is integral to developing the best ideas in the optimum time-frame, across open networks of new media.

admin @ April 23, 2008