Technology and Intellectual Property

Once upon a time, a man named Thomas Edison had a company called Edison’s Motion Picture Patent Company. This company held the majority of patents relevant to motion picture production. Any producer who wanted to use this technology had to get his express approval. Anyone who tried to create motion pictures without this approval risked being sued by Edison’s infamous legal staff. In hopes of being able to continue to experiment and produce motion pictures a group of artists and producers who called themselves the “independents” decided the best way to avoid Edison’s lawsuits was to move as far from Edison’s base in New Jersey as possible.
They eventually ended up in a small enclave in the western section of Los Angeles whose primary appeal was that its proximity to Mexico allowed for quick getaways if they heard that Edison’s men were on the way. This enclave still exists. Today, Hollywood serves as the entertainment capital of the world.
This story kept coming to mind as I read Lawrence Lessig’s account of the Google Print lawsuit. I found myself thinking of the numerous laws still on the books that document the doomed measures instituted to protect the populace and the stockholder from the dangers of madmen, artists and intellectuals.
Laws, put in place to ensure that drivers of horseless carriages stopped at each railroad crossing and waved red lanterns to warn wandering trains that this automobile intended to cross the tracks. Laws made by people who had carriages of their own and drivers for those carriages. People who had never driven an automobile in their lives and they didn’t plan to. Why would they? After all, automobiles scared horses. It never occurred to them that they might be the last of a dying breed.
The ever increasing changes in technology and the increased rate of patent issues related encourages individuals to forget that this is not a technology issue. Thomas Jefferson addresses this issue however in the letter he wrote to Isaac McPherson on August 13th 1813.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."

Thomas Jefferson was not just a founding father he was also a revolutionary an inventor and the first patent examiner.

Jefferson, Thomas. Portable Thomas Jefferson. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1977.
"Thomas Edison." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 17 Feb. 2007 <>
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York: Penguin Press, 2004. 368 pages.