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Open Sourcing Innovation
Super_Z writes "Reading an old issue of The Economist, I came over this - whynot.net - a forum for ideas - effectively open sourcing innovation. Doing so, these ideas can hopefully be adapted faster and on a broad basis. Now if I can only get someone to take up and produce my radarguided laser mosquito trap."
The Global Ideas Bank has been around for quite a while (in Internet time ;-)
:-)
There are several other, similar sites as well.
Is there a portal to such sites... yet?
Should Exist has a very strong little commmunity centered on actually carrying out the ideas that they come up with. I seriously suggest checking them out.
See also http://shouldexist.org, for ideas that (well), should exist. :^)
Based on scoop (the same engine that runs Kuro5hin), and been running for a few years now. There's some neat stuff within there.
--Robert
I don't know where you get "implies", but in fact you can't say, "Hey, I thought of a radar guided laser mosquito trap!" and patent it. An implementation is necessary. (If the patent officials do their job properly, which the frequently don't, but that has nothing to do with the validity of the concept.)
Except for the emphasis on working prototypes, the current system is exactly what you want.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
But once product or process ideas are published on whynot.com, this means nobody can turn around and patent the broadest form of the idea. Of course, engineers who implement the ideas can patent the specifics of their inventions, but they can't get a monopoly on what's been published.
it takes a lot of money to get a book published (editing, printing, distribution, advertising, and the monetary risk of the fact that all those things happen up front.)
Not to the extent anymore. CafePress Self Publish handles printing and online distribution, and you can scale advertising up gradually: a K5 ad here, a Google ad there, etc.
Although [copyright] isn't like real property in every respect, it shares many common features: the right to sell it, the limitation on who may use it, the ability to sue if ownership is violated.
Copyright also resembles real property (as opposed to personal property) in other ways: there exists a limited number of "land" (due to the finite length of a work and the similarity doctrine), and it doesn't expire (due to the Eldred decision).
There is another great Idea Board called SlipHead Design.
They have some pretty cool ideas on there and really seem to have the 'right feel' of what a good idea board should encompass.
Bats would normally eat those mosquitos... just install a bat house on your property.
That's quite an insightful observation: I've never entirely understood why copyright is a property whose rights expire.
It's been suggested that the reason is that intellectual property isn't a right, but rather that ideas (not being physical objects) are community property and that the government establishes the fiction of property rights with a limited term to encourage people to innovate.
If so, IP rights are their own thing, and not bound by any other understanding of property. But there are important things one wants to ensure in your fiction of intellectual property, the most important being the right to trade it and protect it, at least during the term. Otherwise it has no value and the fiction is worthless.
Some would say that's good, and point to Linux as proof that people will innovate in the absence of special property protections. That's a complicated topic which we're sure as hell not going to solve in this forum.