"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it."
John Perry Barlow quotes Th. Jefferson in The Economy of Ideas in Wired 2.03, way back in '94
{here more than anywhere I wish for a larger audience. it's something I've thought hard about for a long time. the early silicon gold rush, when it became clear that it was mainly about getting something new and necessary, or valuable or wanted, and locking it down. putting a meter on it, charging royalties for it, building a necessity for it into something everyone would have to have, visionless grasping building on the naive dreams of the true inventors.eight years ago my girlfriend's kid was learning about things and one of those things was poetry, and it occurred to me to show him the invisible hands of the early poets. in his language. in our language, dude. every single last word of the language was made by a poet. it is exactly an act of poetic expression, to say what has not been yet said, to say in a new brief way what needs to be spoken, to give the people words for things they know but don't know how to say. tree. baby. mama. drink. shit. butterfly. there was a moment in our history when those words did not exist, and there was a moment in which they became, and after that they existed. that moment of becoming began in the heart and in the throat of a poet. the creation of language, because it is so complex, or because it's continuous and becomes so complex, and because it evolves so 'organically' over such large amounts of time, is invisible to us. you have to figure it out, or have it explained to you, it had to come from somewhere. language is a gift without which we would be hiding in the trees. and it is 'intellectual property', nothing more or less than that. what seems so obvious to me may still need to be spoken: these words were given freely to us, we all inherit them. they are so common that they've become unnoticable, and that, in this upside down society means they're valueless, but the truth is exactly the opposite. they are necessary, essential, absolutely vital. and they're free.
it's time to recognize the damage, and the danger, inherent in the positions of ownership and the postures of outrage adopted by those who would cripple human progress, who would intentionally diminish the growth of what we are, all of us, together, to benefit themselves.}
