I've heard many arguments for why Intellectual Property is bad. Most have the word "freedom" or "unfair" in them. In general most anti IP arguments are from the perspective of how big business is infringing on the rights of individuals or this great country or whatever. But here's an argument that you probably haven't heard that is a bit different: IP is expensive for businesses and the cost is rising steadily. I don't mean that it costs a lot to register a patent or copyright, or even that it costs a lot to litigate when IP is infringed upon. I am sure all that is expensive and you might make an argument that it is not worth it based solely on those aspects. However, those costs might be nothing compared to the amount of overhead businesses incur to protect IP at the operational and security levels.
One of my main goals at work recently has been to increase communications between peoples and groups of peoples. The idea is that a lot of time (read: money) is wasted because people don't get information fast enough, or people duplicate work, or people are giving the wrong message to customers, and so forth and so on. If you can improve information flow then everyone is more efficient and you make (or at least keep) more money. This isn't my job—I write code—but it is something I see as being very important, extremely deficient, and there is a whole bunch of technology (weblogs, sem. web stuff, IM, mailing lists, etc.) that I feel can improve how information gets passed around. When choosing goals you usually don't find ones as nice as that—it is in bad shape, should be easy to improve, and is important. “Perfect,” I say, “what can go wrong?” Imagine my surprise if after a few months of really observing the current state of things and attempting to move forward with a few key ideas, I've accomplished almost nothing and things have actually gotten worse. “How,” you ask, “and what can this possibly have to do with IP?” I'll tell you, and it has everything to do with IP.
I'm trying to get people at work to publish information on the projects they're working on; any information, all information. Formal documentation is great but we need more than that. We want informal stuff. The type of stuff you see in email discussions [mailing lists, forums] and journals of what people and teams are doing [weblogs]. I want that information available in some text based format (HTML, XML, whatever I don't care) and I want it all on the web—not public, of course, but it needs to be web enabled [HTTP] on the LAN. I want feeds for syndication [RSS, Atom] and everything aggregated somewhere [Schwag w00t!]. This must all be searchable [htdig]. At the end of the day I want anyone/anywhere in the company to be able get information on what anyone/anywhere in the company is doing, right now. When someone finds out what someone is doing and they think it is useful they need to be able to keep track of what they're doing. This is all happening now in the F/OSS world and it works, it can work for us too. It could all be so beautiful, it could save the company tons of money, you would have to ship the money to the bank in dump trucks, we could build another building just for the money and swim in it whenever we wanted, I can smell the money it is so close... But wait! Recent company policy has mandated that NO information revealing details of IP owned by company or portions thereof be publicly available on the company Intranet. All information must be password protected and access to said information must not be granted to any individual without approval by [insert some important person who knows who is and is not to be trusted here].
Okay, so all of this hasn't really happened, yet. But I am being asked to require authorization for certain pieces of information and to otherwise limit availability of information. The reasons seem valid, I guess. It seems that some place at some time, some company hired in some consultant who smuggled out some IP related information and then sold it to some competitor. One of the funnier reasons is that there are apparently some employees who do nothing but print stuff they find on the LAN and then immediately throw it away—it is available later that night for the dumpster divers. And then there is the worry of someone hacking into the LAN and having all this information available at there finger tips. All valid concerns when protecting IP.
But I'm not arguing against the idea that you need strong security if you want to protect all of this IP, I am arguing whether the expense of protecting all of this IP is worth the value of the IP. I think I have a pretty good vantage point for evaluating the costs—at least with regards to efficiencies. I work at a large corporation by day (which I love by the way; very good company) and do Free Software development at night and on weekends. From here, one of the first things I observe is that the FS/OSS community has a huge asset in that they do not have to protect IP (at least, not the way businesses do). Having everything open means all of the benefits I outlined previously. Further, the value of this asset will increase as the amount of information increases and types of information widen. When I look over to the proprietary model, this massive growing asset (information) somehow becomes a liability with huge expense.
So how much is the IP really worth? I'm not asking rhetorically, I feel I've given a glimpse into the costs from the operational side now I want to know, how much is this stuff worth?