Intellectual Property
From Gothpoodle
In the First Wave civilizations, the fundamental source of wealth was land, on which cattle could graze or food crops could be raised. In the Second Wave civilizations, land gave way to capital, the ownership of industrial machinery. Third Wave and later civilizations still make use of land and capital, but today the fundamental source of wealth is information.
Whether encoded as algorithms in a computer, sequences of DNA, or the molecular structure of a nanotech device, information has defined wealth since late in the 20th century. The most critical feature of information is that it can easily be duplicated. It’s possible to define who owns a given piece of land or a given item of industrial equipment, but any number of people can “own” the same piece of information. Even the physical representations of information – computer programs, genetic sequences, or nanodevices – can easily be copied (in fact, some of them tend to copy themselves). In any case, new information is normally useless until it is shared widely.
So how can someone who develops new, useful information make a profit, especially in cases where such development is very expensive? The answer is the legal concept of intellectual property. The developer holds the exclusive right to make copies of the information, expressed in a patent or copyright which is enforced by the state. As long as he holds this right, he can sell copies for any price the market will meet, usually many times what it costs to simply produce the copies. Anyone else who attempts to make copies (other than for individual, private use) can be punished with civil or criminal penalties. In this way, an artificial scarcity is imposed on the information, keeping its price high enough so that its owner can make a profit.
Like many legal concepts, intellectual property is a fiction, viable only as long as everyone agrees to be bound by it. Such agreement has sometimes been hard to come by. Even in 2000, fierce controversies were breaking out over the ownership of computer software, digital recordings of music, genetically engineered seeds, and other forms of intellectual property. Whenever the public saw too great a discrepancy between the value of information and the price charged for it, piracy became widespread. Individuals copied software, recordings, genetic and nanonic designs. Entire nations, falling behind in the race for technical innovation, chose not to enforce the international agreements protecting intellectual property. Property owners struck back with punitive laws and elaborate anti-piracy technology. In many ways, the conflict over intellectual property has defined the 21st century, just as the conflict over capital property defined the 20th century.
The conflict continues today, with whole ideologies devoted to one side or the other of the struggle. It has often been a matter of life of death, as when intellectual property issues preclude the distribution of cheap “generic” drugs to fight killer diseases. Many an adventure in the Fifth Wave environment can turn on the struggle for ownership of information in the form of intellectual property.
