A while ago I wrote about the way in which Intellectual Property Rights were affecting my day-to-day life; particularly the fact that I may be obliged to resign from my job in order to pursue further university work. The title of that work was The Intellectual Slave. Readers may be interested to know that I have since rid myself of my shackles, and have no strong desire to capitulate to such conditions again in future. Yes, things played out rather in accord with my cynical expectations, and I resigned.

This doesn't really bother me very much, because my university work has been keeping me very busy, thank you, and it's unlikely that I can spare the time for additional paid work anyhow. But now that I'm free of the shackles of intellectual slavery (and the associated salary), has my perspective on Intellectual Property Rights changed? Am I now ready to strike it out on my own as an independent auhor of software (or essays, for that matter) and make my fortune thanks to the wonders of modern Copyright and Patent laws?

In short, how are Intellectual Property Rights affecting my daily life, now that I'm no longer an Intellectual Slave?

In the first instance, the thesis I am writing is on the subject of Internet protocols, particularly mail-related protocols. When writing such a thesis, the primary source of research material is that venerable collection of documents bearing the humble title, "Request for Comments", better known as the RFCs. Fortunately for me, these documents are released under a very liberal copyright license which encourages their dissemination and ready availability. They even expressly permit the creation of derivative works which comment on the RFCs. This is a boon! I have volumes of relevant information at my fingertips, and no cause for concern with regards to copyright violations on my part.

My sincere thanks goes to the Internet Society for being so sparing in their application of Intellectual Property Rights. This strikes me as a genuine attempt to use copyright in a manner intended to promote science and the useful arts. I'm sure I've heard that phrase used in conjunction with copyright before, but I rarely see it actually so applied.

So, I'm appropriately empowered to sit down and gently pound my brain with a hundredweight of RFCs. In approximately five months from now, I hope to have an excellent thesis which both surveys the existing email framework, and offers a detailed new proposal as to how the system can be radically improved. Well, that's the theory, and let's assume for the moment that I achieve that goal. What then? Make my fortune via rigorous application of patent and copyright on the above? Not exactly.

You see, the very free and open nature of the RFCs means that lots of people are free to implement the standards they describe. This openness is one of the fundamental reasons for the runaway success of the Internet relative to other networking systems. Further, the Internet infrastructure is already there, and anything new that comes along to compete with it must overcome the considerable inertia of that incumbency to get adopted at all. If you wish to invent a new protocol and have it widely adopted on the Internet, you're more or less obliged to set it free just so it has a chance to compete. In the parlance of free market economics, "free is hard to beat".

Specifically, in my case, we already have an email system that works. Maybe my proposed system is much better, but unless it's also every bit as free and easy to adopt as the old system, people are likely to stick with what they've got. Indeed, I estimate that the existing system is so well entrenched that any proposed replacement would have to be devoid of Intellectual Property encumberances, readily available for free, able to co-exist with the current system, and be a vast improvement. Trying to make money out of it via patents or copyright sounds like a sure-fire way to kill a good idea.

So what's in it for me? Why do it at all? Well, it interests me, and I think it's a good idea that should get to see the light of day. On top of that, I have to write my thesis on something, and it might as well be something useful and interesting. In any case, if I really do succeed, then I'll suddenly be the world's foremost expert in a great new email system. That's got to present some opportunities, don't you think?

I only hope that I don't get torpedoed by submarine patents or something like that along the way. Intellectual Property Rights are still looking more like a hinderance than a help.