Back in the office today after two weeks, thousands of miles, and what feels like at least 50 national forests driven through.
I spent my vacation driving around the mountain west of the united states. If you’ve never been, it’s worth doing – maybe not twice, but definitely once. As you drive over the sierra nevada mountains from the west coast, you enter the Basin and Range country. Carol and I drove around in this area for nearly two weeks, except for a run up into the Snake River Plain and on into the Montana high plains.
Everywhere you go in the West, you drive across a national forest. 8.5% of the land in the United States is part of the National Forest system.
As I was driving through the Wasatch-Cache Forest at night, it struck me that the vision required to start the protection of lands in 1891 was the kind of vision we need now in intellectual property. If nearly 10% of this country’s physical property can be reserved as a commons – which is so much harder to provide dual-use, public and private – why not for IP?
In other words, we have battles over who gets to use national lands. Drilling in the ANWR is a good example here. But there is such less conflict between dual-use options in non-rivalrous property, we should absolutely be able to pull off a National Research Park system for ideas…
I’m going to be playing with this meme for a while. Comments and suggestions welcome, either here or in email.
I think we have the opposite situation with ideas: they have to be patented to be protected, and there are rules about what can be protected. In particular, I think they can’t be patented if they have already been made public (IANAL).
Damn, this means I can’t patent your this idea now.
Actually, the idea is an outgrowth of the Park system – we can overlay a national research park onto property that is currently off-limits, instead of having to fence off land that cannot be used privately. I’d like to see a world in which all the US patents, for example, have extensive research provisions granted. That doesn’t lower the value of a patent – it increases the value…