World Intellectual Property Day Quotes

If the material world is fundamentally an abundant world, all the more abundant is the spiritual world: the creations of the human mind — songs, stories, filmes, ideas, and everything else that goes by the name of intellectual property. Because in the digital age we can replicate and spread them at virtually no cost, artificial scarcity must be imposed upon them in order to keep them in the monetized realm. Industry and the government enforce scarcity through copyrights, patents, and encryption standards, allowing the holders of such property to profit from owning it. Scarcity, then, is mostly an illusion, a cultural creation. But because we live, almost wholly, in a culturally constructed world, our experience of this scarcity is quite real — real enough that nearly a billion people today are malnourished, and some 5,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. So our responses to this scarcity — anxiety and greed — are perfectly understandable. When something is abundant, no one hesitates to share it. We live in an abundant world, made otherwise through our perceptions, our culture, and our deep invisible stories. Our perception of scarcity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Money is central to the construction of the self-reifying illusion of scarcity.

With nearly 70% of its associates being women, BananaIP has pioneered the participation of women in intellectual property. I hope all organizations will strive towards this goal on World IP Day.

Creativity and innovation, when focused and commercialized, can significantly advance the progress of sustainable development goals.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]

There are people who can’t afford to buy a book or a movie ticket, but this high and mighty society thinks it’s morally wrong that piracy makes cultural products available for free. Fucking assholes, güey. Fucking slave world. Supposedly it’s taboo to talk about this stuff because it implies the negation of the legal system, the pornography of the market, but I don’t give a fuck what defenders of intellectual property say, because, of course, they defend the inanest concept ever invented. Because copyrighting ideas and artistic creations is a repulsive kind of elitism, truth be told. I’m not saying we should deny authorship to authors, but we should think about what piracy does for the people. The siblings once told me that filmmakers in Ecuador make a deal with the pirated-DVD sellers to pirate their movies, and that’s super cool, right, because the world is horribly unequal and we, the third-world simpletons, know that better than anyone. I write and hope I’ll be able to publish someday, but not because I want to make a show of my intellectual property or restrict the circulation of whatever I make to the little group of people who can pay for it. I want to publish because when an editor takes a risk on your work, others are more likely to read you, and I write to be read, dude, not to go around playing the part of the tortured writer-type. In fact, I’d love if someone pirated my work once it’s published. The day I’m pirated I’ll celebrate for real, I swear.