A relatively restful weekend was inevitably followed by a hectic few days. Yesterday I went to the LSE in the morning to meet Professor Anil Gupta at a sort of research / networking event. He's doing some fascinating work around patents in India, most notably in helping the rural poor file patents for their inventions to protect them against Western multinationals. His work fits nicely into the wider battle against biopiracy (e.g. the infamous Basmati rice patent) and reform of the treaty on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

There are so many interesting issues provoked by the collision of development and so-called "intellectual property" (IP). The current regime punishes poor people for openly sharing knowledge, but rewards companies for taking exclusive control of information that could save lives or develop nations. Gupta's Honey Bee network is a wonderful practical project that tries to tackle some of these issues in a very grassroots way. But he's also working in academia, combining his academic and practical insights to produce a very grounded approach. Great inspiration :)

His thoughts on the ethical issues surrounding the exploitation of indigenous knowledge were particularly insightful. Capitalism works based on asymmetrical information - I know something is potentially worth more than you think so I buy it off you, develop it and sell it in a new market. This is the essence of IP transactions - companies buy up innovations and sell them to new markets. But what if the innovator doesn't have the slightest idea about the invention's true value? Then the company usually pays a pittance and reaps an enormous profit. So it's a matter of scale - how big is the information gap? But how could you possibly pick a particular size of gap and say "that is the largest it can be, any smaller and it's a fair deal"? Questions like this are at the heart of the development agenda, and really put a spanner in the works of simplistic intellectual property theories...

I also talked to a few other people about Remix Reading, and wandered around the truly bizarre room the function was held in. The walls made exotic sounds, and they were filled with little notches containing artefacts from around the world - from what looked like African masks to Victorian weight scales to a poster advertising an art exhibition in Glasgow from the 1920s!

Then I went to meet Clare (Remix Reading & friend) for lunch, before hooking up with Rob Myers (artist & hacker), Jon Phillips (artist & Creative Commons staffer) and his girlfriend Lu Fang. We talked over soup about the shortcomings of Creative Commons and the issues the free culture movement faces in discussing and dealing with them. A lot of them are summarised in my talk with annotated notes about the history of Remix Reading that I gave at the LSE last week.

Finally, when Clare, Jon and Lu had left, I chatted with Rob about lots of theoretical issues around IP, and how we might fit them all together to form the basis of a coherent critique. More food for my dissertation, which I really need to talk to my supervisor about some time! Here's something of a mind map:

Copyright and patents are state-granted monopolies as a bargain from society in return for increased creativity

• With alternative funding the financial justification would drop out
• Thomas Pogge and his proposal for non-exclusive patents granted on the basis of social utility would be one interesting alternative
• Cory Doctorow and others who emphasise using charisma and fan loyalty is another for creators looking to commercialise their activities but not their information
• Professor Angell, Creative Commons and others are finding many other ways of commercialising creativity without requiring exclusive control of information
• Can the categories of use (commercial/non-commercial, derivative work, etc.) match up to all actual uses, or do they further complicate matters?
• Is 'folk culture' a totally different context from mass culture or high culture, and as such not appropriate for CC?
• Rewarding a basic income would take the 'pay the rent' problem away from all creators, and would be complemented by the above schemes
• It's more than just a legal/financial question
  • Public domain vs. GPL - sharing binaries without releasing source code, relates to problems with CC licenses and original/professional quality materials behind released MP3s/JPEGs/etc.
  • Open formats & free software are required for "real" freedom with content, otherwise you might not be able to exercise your negative freedom
  • Poverty and access are issues for real freedom, beyond just allowing people to use/share/modify, should a copyleft philosophy integrate these concerns or take a classic liberal stance of conceptually separating them?
  • Encouraging and developing genuine commonality might be another social goal tied in with creativity, a-la David Berry.

Given all of that, which is far from a comprehensive overview of the issues around IP... can I/we extract some set of guiding principles, and if so what are they? Or is the very problem of IP the attempt to apply a blanket provision to a complex field?