Blayne Sucks

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, recently posted about copyrights on his blog. He makes a really great analogy about borrowing property and shows how it’s not truly a “victimless” crime, but I think the really interesting thing here is to see someone who personally owns a very valuable library of copyrighted material speaking in a very down to earth fashion about them.

It’s very easy to think about patents, copyright and trademarks in the very broad corporate sense because those are the cases that are most often reported in the news. I’m sure that as the creator of a hugely popular comic strip, Scott Adams would probably fall into this category as well, but his post comes off as a lot more relaxed than that. As a journeyman reader of his blog, most of his posts come off as very down to earth and direct. It’s good to see a glimpse of the more human side of this issue once in a while.

There was a post on Slashdot recently about the Verizon vs. Vonage debate. A lot of the comments are bashing the intellectual property system in this country as only backing the huge conglomerate corporations interest. It makes for somewhat interesting reading, but the usual Slashdot rules apply. Of course, in the end, it’s a bunch of non-lawyers talking about legal issues. (Just like this post here!)

I do wonder though how much of a chicken and an egg issue this is. Once you come up with a really killer idea, you tend to become a huge conglomerate corporation really fast. Plus, it’s not worth the legal fees to sue smaller businesses that don’t have the assets to be collectible anyhow. Maybe all these huge intellectual property lawsuits seem like giant corporations talking about incomprehensibly large amounts of money, but perhaps they also started out as one guy drawing a comic.