For several months now, I have been contributing to The Jakarta Post with a colleague, friend, and boss of mine, Kayee Man. After a while we thought that maybe not many people read our articles, as we got very few responses from our readers. But some days ago, I checked my office email address, which is forwarded to my personal email, and found an email that was sent back in July 2006 and apparently got into my personal email’s ‘spam’ folder because it had no subject.
The email was both pleasantly surprising as well as rather shocking because the sender was none other than the author of “Creative Economy”, John Howkins, who read one of our articles “But … That was My Idea” and wrote a rather angry email saying that we were wrong in that ideas should not be owned. Apparently Howkins is also the president of Adelphi Chapter, which aims to “ensure that everyone has access to ideas and knowledge, and that intellectual laws do not become too restrictive.”
Baffled by the thought how our ‘neutral’ article could trigger such a strong response from author of a book we quoted, I responded to Howkins’ email asking him why according to him ideas should not be owned, because clearly authors (of books, articles, designs, ideas) would like to and should get credits for their intellectual brainchild. So where is the misalignment?
I explained to Howkins that in Indonesia, respect for authorship of ideas and due credits for authors could not be over emphasized. The international copyright law is highly abused in Indonesia because Howkins’ book, for example, costs more than a sixth of minimum salary in Indonesia – which makes his book and most imported books highly inaccessible for most members of this society. If the international copyright law isstrictly maintained in Indonesia, very few could have access to development of ideas and knowledge from other countries.
This ‘inadequacy’ and ‘casualness’ about copyright of books, however, in my opinion should not extend towards ‘inadequacy’ and ‘casualness’ about copyright of ideas. In Indonesia most people are rather casual about authorship of ideas that plagiarism can be found in many forms.
But it is difficult to blame it on anyone coming out of Indonesian conventional education to know that we are supposed to write down the name of the people we quote and the sources of our quotations. How could we when we are often asked by our teachers to write about a reading without having to differentiate whether what we write is our own thoughts and interpretations of the reading or simply rewording or even blatant copying from the book.
What I learned, though, is that most people – even the very famous ones – would gladly share their ideas, presentations, or even workshops if only we ask them politely and credit them properly in our adaptations. Giving people their due credits not only promote 'good work' but improve your own credibility as a person.
Similar to how my stance in this matter is originated and influenced by my own background and the society I’m living in, it seems that Howkins’ stance in this matter seems to likewise originated and influenced by his own background and environment.
Kayee (English-born Asian) noted that prominent English education leaders seem to have this inkling towards patenting their ideas. Examples of them being Edward deBono (famous for his Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking) and Tony Buzan (famous for his Mind Map), who both attach their personal names to their expression of ideas, profit from trainings and have endorsed trainers to distribute their ideas.
Compare them for example with prominent American education leader like Howard Gardner(famous for his Multiple Intelligences) whom has website through which you can download some of his papers – for free. No wonder Howkins is so adamant about too restrictive ownership of ideas.
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6 comments:
The way I see it, copyright and patents give a monopoly the their owners for a certain period of time.
I suppose you should look at the costs or benefits of these monopolies.
Longer monopolies give greater incentive to create, but also could crowd out future creaters.
for example, recently, performers in the UK have been pushing for an increase of copyright over their works from 50 to 70 years. (these performers were big in the 60s ;)).
there was a decision not to prolong copyright, because it was felt that on average society would lose.
losses could be:
1) music companies don't support new talent, but continue to make money from the same old artists
2) old content could be used to create something new and fresh by today's artists
contrast this with Disney for example, who pushes for longer copyright legislation in the States (quite successfully) every time their's is about to run out on Mickey Mouse!
there is a lot of other things wrong with IP protection in practice - in the software industry for example it is highly questionable whether patents benefit innovators much at all.
John: “… in the software industry for example it is highly questionable whether patents benefit innovators much at all.”
Dewi: … which is why I think innovators should benefit from their ideas. Otherwise they won’t be able to sustain themselves, and continue to develop their ideas. On the other hand, I agree that there should be limits to ownership of ideas, for the specific reason you mentioned in relation to allowing new ideas and new talents to take part in the competition.
In my view, both the rights and the limits to ownership to ideas should be acknowledged. The question of delicate balance between the two poles is what the debate is all about. The unequal condition throughout the world makes the situation even more complicated.
yeh the balance is the thing, i for one don't know of any general heuristic to decide upon the amount of protection is optimal. something to think about.
Just another point to consider: economics rests on the assumption of information/knowledge symmetry. Of course lost of econ assumptions are unrealistic. But consider the software domain: where knowledge is open, innovations happen faster. A new Linux version (of most any distro) is released in less than a year.
Linux and the whole open-course ware movement is an interesting case to bring up in relation to the issue of idea ownership.
But I would argue that such a movement is only possible in a mature society with high sense of ethicality, morale and integrity.
It's also a different playing field altogether, as those who can contribute to such a development are actually highly specialized and knowledgable people. So it's not easy for anyone just to claim ownership/ authorship.
And indeed, when that level is reached, it is very exciting (albeit exhilirating) to see how fast development could happen. And for free too!
Yet, let us not forget that Linux was born as a reaction against monopoly of softwares. And as a movement, it would not have gained such reputation if it had not requested that people who used its ideas attributed them back to the source.
IP / ideas is the weirdest of property.
it can be copied for practically nothing, and you cannot be sure to hold on to an idea once anyone else has seen it.
so unless you discover something and don't use it at all chances are people will take your IP from you somehow, sooner or later.
IP is actually a pretty slippy thing to hold on to -- in any field, anywhere, any time.
what's interesting, is that linux and the FLOSS movement has successfully taken advantage of IP (costless reproduction) and has created very successful profit making ventures out of it.
maybe Linux etc is the first movement to really understand the economics of information and IP... (will be interesting to see what other industries will follow)
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