 The thing about investing money in open source projects is that programmers tend to buy things that distract them from coding. Please forgive my relatively boring hat, it's cold here. So the state of intellectual property rights is a little bit of a mess right now. I mean there's stupid stuff like Warner Brothers legal department issuing DMCA takedowns for the movie trailers that they themselves paid to advertise with, but in the tech industry things are getting a little bit crazy. Google, Samsung and HTC are being sued by Microsoft, Sony and Apple. Google is suing Samsung on the side. Microsoft is currently navigating 45 separate lawsuits and also there are companies that are being formed with the sole purpose of buying vaguely worded patents and then trying to shake down other companies that may possibly infringe on those patents. This is a little bit strange because patents have existed since at least ancient Greece and you think we would have figured it out by now. The first recorded mention of anything resembling a patent was from the Greek historian Philarcus who in 300 BC wrote of a group of bakers on the Greek colony of Cybarus who competed to come up with new and interesting pastries and cakes. If any of those bakers happened upon a fantastic new recipe for biscuits or cookies, the other bakers were forbidden from copying that recipe for a year. This basic equation is how intellectual property rights are supposed to work today. Somebody invests something awesome then as a reward they get exclusive rights to make and profit from whatever it is that they invented for a brief period of time before other people can knock it off and make money from it. That exclusive right to profit is supposed to make people want to innovate more leading to new and better ideas. Unfortunately, there's a growing sentiment that patents and copyrights are being used by large corporations to stamp out competition and that they're ineffective at protecting inventors like they used to. As an example of this, copyright limits have been almost continually extended since 1790. Most recently in 1998 was something called the Copyright Extension Act. Because it was lobbied for by Disney, it's sometimes referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act as it extended the time limit on corporate patents to 120 years after first publication. That's a far cry from one year to profit off of cinnamon buns. Opposite the growing trend to patent everything and use those patents to tax or stifle your competition, there's the open source movement. You could try to nail down the origins of the open source movement to the creation of the GNU project at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Department in the 80s, but that would be ignoring all sorts of open sourcey things that have been happening throughout human history, stuff like science and art. Fundamentally, the open source movement is about collaboration of interested parties for a common goal and then free distribution of the solution once it's found. Like if you really hated the web browsers that were available to you in 1993 and everybody did, you could get together with a bunch of your coder friends to come up with something better. Notice that there's no mention of money here, it's just innovation for the purpose of making stuff better. That's important. Open source software has given us a lot of cool stuff and there might be a scientific reason for that. There's a lot of research that shows that if you give people rewards based on their performance, people tend to do a lot better at tasks that are sort of mindless and tedious. However, if they're doing stuff that requires creative thinking, if you offer a monetary reward, they will do worse than they would do if they were just focused on the problem and the joy of solving it. For example, if you give people uncooked spaghetti and marshmallows and say, just build the biggest tower you can, they will do better on average than they will if you say, I will give you $10 if you build the biggest tower. In light of the success of many open source projects, maybe the problem isn't just the patent system itself. I mean, it works in pretty much the same way it has since ancient Greece. Maybe part of the problem is, depending on monetary rewards to drive innovation, that's not to say that we shouldn't still reward people who have great ideas. I mean, if Wikipedia ads have taught us anything, it's that financial support for even the coolest stuff has to come from somewhere. But maybe if we relax a little bit about making a million bucks from our ideas and focused on the ideas themselves, we might get more Mozilla Firefox and, although it's better than it was, less internet explorer. Is intellectual property law just broken? Or is the recent flood of patent trolls the result of caring more about the price of an idea than its value? Leave comments, let me know what you think. There are a ton of current events that I could mention that are relevant to this topic, but I wanted to talk explicitly about something called the Innovation Act. It just passed the House and it is designed to stop patent trolls from extorting money from companies that do actual work. There's a link in the description if you want to read up on it. Comments were sparse last week, but Nick and Sammy AM had an excellent discussion about how a possible alternative to privacy might be total openness of information. You should go check it out and tell them that they're awesome. Thanks for watching. Next week's topic is going to be genetic engineering. I'm going to try something new. Blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you next week.