An Idea Sparks Change
An idea can spark a revolution. It can change how we perceive our lives. In recent memory, the smart phone. What would we all do without our metal and plastic cases filled with circuits? We would certainly press forward, somehow. A smart phone, a potato peeler or a transistor radio (my Dad still fondly remembers how revolutionary they were) at one point a genius idea someone made a fortune from. All of these items have one basic thing in common, they are tangible. We can pick them up, make use of them. Ooh and ahh at what an amazing time saving device it is, whatever it is.
In time many of these groundbreaking products lose their appeal or practicality, a pager is one I remember and short lived it was. In the late 90s between the clunky, way too expensive mobile phone and smart phones was a mass market solution, the pager. In the present, ask anyone on the street, likely a fair number of people won’t know what one is. Any invention we can touch or consume is tangible, it physically exists, we can hold it, break it, exalt it.
There are many revolutionary ideas we cannot physically possess. An example is an improvement to an existing product. The design and proof the design makes a product better, more efficient, lighter in weight, less expensive to produce is intangible. We cannot physically hold an idea. We can document it on paper or a file on a computer. Although the presentation of the concept is printed, the invention itself is untouchable. Ideas making a product more appealing to the masses does have value. Tinkerers and inventors can make a living designing improvements to an existing device. Their ideas are worth something to a company. It’s fair to say if you the reader develops a design feature making one electronics manufacturer’s cell phone product more useful to consumers, they will likely pay for your ingenuity.
Another form of intangibles we can earn a living from is writing and performance. Authors, songwriters and choreographers compose a work for the rest of us to appreciate. Their talent allows them to take feelings, observations and personal experiences and mold into a screenplay for example. If it weren’t for their ability to process what they see into words or motions (as a choreographer does), we wouldn’t have the resulting composition to enjoy. The arts community also have ability to protect what they produce, their product if you will. Copyright and trademark are the legal rules established for protecting intangible creations.
Intellectual property is the term assigned to our creative community’s output. Just because an artist spends hundreds of hours composing a painting on an 11” x 14” canvas does not mean what they create is worth the same as songwriter composing a song in thirty minutes. The time required to create the work is irrelevant. If the song that took 30 minutes to write turns out to be a top 10 single, it is possibly going to earn the writer a lot more than the one-time sale of a painting. The painter can also capitalize on the original work by selling prints. It is an ancient business concept, if one can reproduce and sell multiples of an object, it is within their ability to do so. Establishing a copyright allows us in modern times to do this without others copying our work legally. This code of law provides protection against others using our ideas for their own profit. We can therefore have a society with an honest balance between the creative world and the industrial/technological world.
