That's my idea!

[This was a reply to a comment on my Idealab Educate post, but it's more of it's own incipient essay.]

I agree that understanding and properly using copyright and fair use is important, and I keep the Center for Social Media's resources in my toolkit. Moreover, I greatly value the work done to make the facts of what is permissible well-known. Clarity of the law is essential to prevent obscurity and uncertainty from being used as a bludgeon by people with lawyers on tap.

We need more though!

The only justifiable reason for restrictions on use of ideas and sharing of information is to reward creators, or, from the public's point of view, to encourage innovation of public use or interest. But is infringing the freedom to share and use something that is infinitely replicable – concepts, ideas, data, digital information – even a good way to do this? Most of the benefit from enforcing these restrictions with an expensive, intrusive government and legal system goes not to creators but to non-creating owners. And the true cost of this unnatural system is even higher.

All culture, science, and politics is built on what came before. The harm to the public of innovation cut off by patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and copyright may not be necessary.

Open source free software provides a model of developing and building our common intellectual good counter to the vast apparatus of laws and government intervention required to force people to treat information as property.

Free software (free as in freedom) does not provide an adequate funding model for innovation, although many people (such as myself with colleagues in the Agaric Design Collective) make a living working with and contributing to free software.

What if we as society or people working in groups rewarded valued innovation directly, and dropped all the restrictions we use to try to make information another form of property, which it is not?

A lot of human progress, justice, and liberty rides on replacing our broken system for encouraging innovation with one that does so more efficiently, more successfully, and without infringing on fundamental human rights.