Clinamen

The discourse of intellectual property continues to thrive. Rodney emailed me this NPR story about the transformation of 7-11s into Kwik-E Marts to promote the new Simpsons movie. I heard the story and, as Rodney predicted, was interested (in fact, I blogged last week about the Kwik E Mart promo (before the current intellectual property fight started) over at the Blogora).

The Leo Burnett ad agency (awesome website by the way) claims that their idea was stolen. LB met with Fox and pitched the idea, but Fox didn't really go for it. Months later, the idea is becoming a reality. Fox claims that the idea was "already in the works" when they met with Leo Burnett and that they had told the ad agency as much. LB is considering a lawsuit.

As NPR correspondent Elizabeth Blair explains in the story: "Who owns an idea is a very tricky question." This story definitely demonstrates the difficulty of "owning" an idea. Ideas circulate amongst people and organizations, and maybe the Kwik-E Mart idea was the result of a collaboration between LB and Fox. Either way, the important point seems to be that neither company "owns" the idea. If LB helped develop it, they probably deserve some compensation. However, this doesn't mean it's "their" idea. This is the trickiness of intellectual property. It's not property in the same way that your house or your car is property. If I own a car, it's fairly easy to understand why and how theft of that car is wrong. It's an object. It can only be in one place at a time. An idea, on the other hand, can be in multiple places at the same time. So, thinking in terms of "ownership" becomes difficult.

Of course, nothing I'm saying here is new...but maybe I can offer one new twist on the conversation. We might be better served by thinking of Intellectual Property in terms of "emergence" and complexity theory. The Kwik-E Mart idea seems to have emerged out of a complex situation involving people from Fox and LB. LB is a company offering a service, but that service is not an "idea." They are not wrapping up a box, putting their idea in it and handing it over:

(image courtest of PocketMac)


Instead, LB is offering a bunch of smart, creative people who can aid in the development of an idea. They are the Axon and Fox is the Dendrite:

(Image Courtesy of Society for Neuroscience)

The idea doesn't happen without Fox and LB collaborating, but that means that it's nobody's property. LB should be pissed, but not because someone stole their property. Rather, they should be pissed because (if in fact LB helped develop the idea) Fox is conveniently forgetting that they had some help putting this thing together. Nobody owns the idea, at least not in the same way you own an object. We might even take this discussion out of the realm of complexity theory and into the realm of (post)philosophy - the idea emerges out of the play of différance. We can try to pin down the origin all we want, but we'll always fail. Any idea emerges out of a complex situation, and this mean that no one owns it.

Isn't this a healthier (and more realistic way) of dealing with the problem of intellectual property? Notice that I haven't dismissed LB's concerns about compensation. I've merely reframed what it is that they're offering - a service rather than an object.