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Tag Archives: intellectual property

Partitioning idea spaces into containers

Some scattered thoughts on idea flows. The global idea space is partitioned in various ways. One example would be peoples speaking different languages. English speakers all understand each other, Japanese speakers all understand each other, but there are relatively few people who speak Japanese and English very well. We can understand this situation in an […]

Posted 29 August 2010 † johan § Philosophy ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , , , ,

The identity crisis of the internet

The architecture of the Internet is fundamentally decentralized, a fact that continues to impress to this day. The breadth and depth of the sea of applications and uses we have made of it, and its resilience, impress perhaps all the more, because many of our experiences from everyday life tell us that some of the […]

Posted 26 May 2010 † johan § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , ,

Searching and creating

We distinguish between inventions and discoveries. You can own the intellectual property rights to an invention, but not to a discovery (you can’t patent the discovery of mercury or selenium, for instance). Inventions are meant to be created, and discoveries are meant to be sought for. But sometimes, the line between invention and discovery is blurry. […]

Posted 20 July 2009 † johan § Computer science § Philosophy ‡ Comments (4) ° Also tagged: ,