Guardian essay on “Owning Ideas”
The Guardian has an Essay by Andrew Brown titled “Owning ideas”. While not going into great detail, the text covers many problems that arise from treating ideas as if they were spare parts for cars.
It starts:
The difference between ideas and things is obvious as soon as someone hits you over the head with an idea – so obvious that until recently it was entirely clear to the law. Things could have owners and ideas could not. Yet this simple distinction is being changed all around us. Ideas are increasingly treated as property – as things that have owners who may decide who gets to use them and on what terms.
And it ends:
This is madness. Ideas aren’t things. They’re much more valuable than that. Intellectual property – treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded – is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.
I highly recommend reading the middle part for yourself.