One part of the argument which has blown up around SOPA/PIPA that has not been discussed much is the concept of when something becomes your intellectual property.

I am delighted to see that the PIPA vote has been postponed and that most sane people now realise that the proposed legislation was badly thought out and possibly unnecessary unless you wish to introduce American censorship of the World Wide Web.   There is however, another debate which I doubt anyone will be entering into right now and that is the very concept of intellectual property.  In the past we have seen how scientists have shared information on technological advances and a more commercially savvy scientists have ended up reaping the rewards as they have been the first to register a patent.  Well known examples include the telephone and the electric lightbulb.  With the advent of computers and the notion that you can protect snippets of code as intellectual Property, there is now so much more scope for taking someone else’s work and registering a patent so that you might benefit from it in the future.

I have never been comfortable with people turning a bit of maths into computer code, registering a patent and then requiring a licence fee from anyone else who wants to use the same bit of maths, but that is the way we have gone.  What it means of course is that if you are clever and inventive/creative, before you show anyone your code or upload it to anywhere on the web, you need to find the necessary knowledge and money to register a patent … and it doesn’t come cheap.

In the eyes of the law, something doesn’t become your intellectual property until you have completed the registration of a patent.  If someone tries to register your idea AND you manage to spot that they are trying to do it, how do you go about objecting to the patent?  More to the point, if you have been using your invention and someone comes along afterwards and manages to register a patent without you realising it, what come-back do you have and are you able to continue to use your idea?  Everything is stacked in favour of the people with money who have  a patent lawyer on the payroll spending thousands of pounds in an often speculative fashion.  I suppose in the days of the gold rush, many a staked claim was stolen by unscrupulous scoundrels but why have we not been able to construct a fairer scheme.

The government has recently said it wants to shake up ICT training to teach people how to program computers rather than simply to use proprietary software.  This is a very good move but any new syllabus should start with a module on Intellectual Property law.