What I described is also called a signal vs. noise problem. Each of these organizations that let other people speak for them are creating "noise" around their message. So when they want to substantively speak to their constituents, it is that much harder to get their attention and moreover their action.

An example of this is Niger Innis'(http://www.hannity.com/guest/innis-niger/10174) recent appearance on Sean Hannity's program where he talked about the signal vs. noise problem among African-American political groups. He said that so often their discussions of issues facing the African-American community were derailed by "noise". Because these groups allow noise they will have the same problem when they try to mobilize their base.

Any group that allows their messaging, brand building, community building, etc. to be co-opted by someone else is setting themselves up for failure in their own mission.

The Bagle Man & Pay What You Want

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090104/2159403281.shtml

http://pricetheory.uchicago.ed u/levitt/Papers/WhatTheBagelManSaw.pdf

i definitely agree with the idea of an easy target. being middle class and educated means that they can hit back. bully's don't like that.

if they start a fight with an educated middle class or above, they're asking for a fight with alumni organizations, trade organizations, facebook groups, etc, etc.

i really liked your imagery: "sepia-toned humans toiling against misery in dark, sweaty basements or ghetto community rooms" beautiful writing.

extreme pricing mistakes like this usually happen when they put information in the wrong field. 287593413357 is probably a serial number of a sku number for them. something that has significance somewhere. when they put it in the price field, the program just said "okay" and charged 2.8 billion.

products that came from literal toys:

Flickr

Skype

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i think he meant more that people would be dismissive and say something to the effect of "that will never amount to more than a toy compared to what we have"

awesome! lol.

"When they run out of legitimate merchandise, they begin to steal intermittently, many times for the first time in their life, so they can continue selling online."

The thing I never understood about his claim is that none of these people with an "online selling habit" know how to purchase more inventory? That they some how find it easier to shop lift than to purchase and resell things? Recruiting accomplices and crossing state lines to steal seems like several times more complex and difficult than doing something like finding a wholesaler, etc.

what happens when books want their cut and movies want their cut and photographers want their cut and screen writers, etc.

where does it end?

One of the interesting unintended consequences of booting people offline is that it is shrinking the market for everyone. A number of different scenarios come to mind.

I spend money online on all kinds of different things. Books, movies, gadgets, plane tickets, gifts, vacations, etc. Pretty much across the consumer spectrum. If I'm booted off purely because of "piracy", this has a direct effect of curtailing all of my current and possibly future online spending. Suddenly I can't make purchases at any online retailer. Nor am I available to make use of Monster.com, or CareerBuilder or DICE, etc. The entire spectrum of my online consumption is wiped out over this one issue.

The other unintended consequence is that if pirates are undeserved customers, you're shrinking the market for your own product and every other musician out there, even the ones that want their work shared.

It seems like a really interesting unintended consequence to this whole idea.

The other side of the story is that the musicians or someone on their side are savvy negotiators to work out a deal like this.

It should also show us that musicians can achieve a position of strength to negotiate from when doing any kind of deal.

Same here in Houston. Several of the news stations are doing a lot of innovative things with the web. One of my favorites is that there is a channel that has a live feed from all of their traffic cameras around town so you actually check on the traffic first hand before you head out. It's not perfect, but a lot of the local news stations are really trying to get community participation in a lot of their stories, from creation to filming to distribution. They're willing to broadcast things like video captured on cell phones of items of local signficance.

the market may shake out a little, but those that survive are already on their way to being really web savvy.

working late today and tomorrow. so i'll just summarize here rather than do a point by point.

first let me say, i've really enjoyed disecting these ideas with you.

in the manufacturing examples i think we're talking about 2 sides of the same coin. i'm pointing out the infinite goods that are bundled in the products and you're pointing out the scare goods. i think that my statements about decreasing the costs of infinite goods and that they increase the value of scare goods is correct. i think that your statement that there are still significant costs on the scare side of manufacturing such as materials, tooling, production, etc. is also correct. since manufacturing is such a scare good dependent industry (that's not a bad thing, just the reality of manufacturing) it will not be as affected by infinite goods as say the music industry.

hate to say it, but patents are not open source. the definition of open source is that you can take what is and do whatever you want with it. you can build on it, you can extend it, etc. yes patents put the information out there, but people are not free to build and extend what's patented. the very idea behind a patent is to limit. limits are not open source.

we're going to have to agree to disagree on copying. i think it's a great thing. mostly because when things can be copied, you no longer have to bear all of the costs. if everyone copies your work suddenly you become the creator of 6 billion copies. this gives you a lot of opportunities. for example. firefox. with all the copies out there Google is paying firefox for the use of their search bar.

if you want to continue this discussion with me (and i'd love to) please email me at marroncito@yahoo.com

right now i don't have the time to keep up with you. you form your responses so quickly. :) this conversation could continue at a slower pace via email.

again thanks for the great conversation. i'm done posting on this article.

your responses are coming faster than mine. i'll try to get my response to this out tonight if not tomorrow. we're starting to see eye to eye on some things.

i really think we've cleared away some of the barriers in our communication.

i'll get something up as soon as i can tonight.

You've presented some interesting business cases. Let me first say that in some of these cases the understanding and application of infinite goods is not going to have an immediate effect. Infinite goods are not a magic pill that cures business ills. Some of these businesses have issues that go deeper than their business model.

The other reason is for a company to truly work with and understand infinite goods, they have to shift their entire culture. They have to approach the business they're in from a new perspective.

So on to the great business cases we're talking about.



I imagine there is quite a bit of development cost in developing proprietary engines. There's the initial development costs, the costs to protect them with patents, the costs to maintain all the secret information, the cost to bring new people up to speed on your proprietary information and the risk that all of these costs ultimately could fail in the market place.

The bulk of the cost is in building prototypes and testing. The other costs are relatively negligible. However, in spite of spending millions (how many is unknown), Caterpillar announced this year that they are leaving the long haul truck engine market because they were unable to figure out how to meet the 2010 emission standards.

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How would you have changed this situation? Great question.

If we're assuming that Caterpillar can adopt the culture necessary to participate in infinite goods, then here's what they could have done.

They can open the problem up to the world to solve. I think your reference to Cummins means that they have developed such an engine, so we already know it's possible. Having numerous people working on this problem would come up with a solution that Caterpillar could manufacture. They already have the infrastructure in place to do the manufacturing.

Why would the world work on such a project? If Caterpillar did it right, because the people working on it find their own benefits in contributing to the project.

Look at Sun Microsystems participation in several open source projects. They seed the project and provide support. The open source community builds all kinds on new value on top of what Sun and others have put out there. Sun then gathers it up and packages it in such a way as to sell to their enterprise customers and others. Caterpillar, over time, could do the same thing with their engine design problem.

Right now because their proprietary work can't solve this problem, they are losing out on the entire market of long haul truck engines. So they lost all that they invested in their R&D, patents, etc. and they lose the market as well.

Understanding and working with infinite goods does not mean that anyone would compel Cummins to release any of their proprietary knowledge. Rather, it would be a bad business decision for Cummins to only use their proprietary information. Cummins has hundreds of employees. A properly developed open source community has thousands even tens of thousands of people working on the same problems. Cummins would ultimately lose market share if they continued only to use their proprietary work. They would lose market share because there's no way they could keep up with the work being done by the open source community.



What would happen if engine makers open sourced the design side, ie. the infinite goods side, of their business and focused on the manufacturing side. The chip maker AMD is doing something similar to this. What would happen is the cost of developing the infinite good would drop to near zero.

The cost is dependent on significant experimentation and long term testing. Based on what we know today, the cost of prototyping and testing systems of this type will continue to be a significant cost. Tooling alone continues to be a huge cost. If the "infinite good" is the design, the cost will continue to be significant well into the future because of the need to demonstrate actual performance.

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Lee from this article is a great example. He just proved the concept of "head tracking" something that will probably prove very valuable for video games in the future. How much did it cost to develop? Not much. Some parts from a Wii and a computer and some infrared lights. Far below any companies R&D budget. Would they have to go in and clean things up a bit? Yes, but the grunt work of finding new and useful applications has been taken care of by Lee in this example. And yes this example can be reproduced almost anywhere in almost any field.



Tens of thousands would join the current hundreds in working on every facet of modern engines.

Ummm...tens of thousands are working on every facet of modern engines.

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Millions then. My point was that no matter how many people a company hires they can not hire every person that would want to work on any given problem. There is no way a company can employees that number anywhere near the size of a good open source community. In an open source community, a company that participates does not have to pay every person that is working on a project, yet they still benefit from all of their work.



This lowers the initial development cost as well as decreases the cost of replacement for employees.

I do not follow this. Going from hundreds of expensive employees to tens of thousands of expensive employees reduces cost? Seems a little backward.

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It does seem a little backward because you're still thinking in terms of controlling the people working on the problem.

First, The employees are expensive for several reasons. You have to pay them for their time. You have to get them through the learning curve of your proprietary product. There is no where outside of your company for them to experience the propriety information, secrets so you have to take them through that learning curve.

In this example, if you have your design information outsourced people are already using it and understanding it for their own projects and ideas. They are already well versed. If the information is outsourced it can reach these tens of thousands of people. Rather than have to hire someone who has a background in design or coding or whatever, it would be more useful who has a background in the designs, codes, etc. that I am using in my business.

There are 2 ways this decreases costs. The first is that you're receiving benefits from people working on the problems that you don't employ. The second is that you don't have to invest as much in training to get new employees through your learning curve. Also, you don't lose as much when employees go. If you are participating actively in an open source community, the people in the community should know as much as your employees.



Now you have a large pool of experienced developers to choose from if you want one in house. His learning curve would be no where near as steep as with proprietary information.

One of the biggest problems is lack of a qualified pool of candidates. The numbers of engineers graduating each year continues to drop. The number choosing to go into engine development continues to drop. While you have a neat little theory, the reality is that the actual pool of participants continues to decrease.

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This pool continues to decrease because of the failure of patents and proprietary information. Because all the information in this field is currently controlled by patent holders, employees destinies are controlled by the bets that these companies make. The employee has to spend a great deal of their own money, time and effort to gain the skills necessary to work in this field, and then they have no direct control over their destiny. That's a huge disincentive to enter into the field.

If rather those in the engine development field participated in the open source community and freed up their information then they would have people participating in their field from their youth. Look at hobbies like go carts and remote control cars and even restoring actual automobiles. People that are drawn to these endeavors would be able to apply the information, knowledge and experience that the engine design companies have open sourced without patents. By the time they were employable. They would already have experience in the exact field and also already have worked on projects similar to the one their employers need them to work on.



So there would be 2 huge savings in this model. The engine manufacturer could focus on manufacturing techniques, efficiencies, etc.

They already do.

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I agree they do. They are very good at it. My point is that a huge cost for them is developing their infinite goods, the new designs, over and over. They have to spend on R&D and prototyping, etc. with no guarantee on a return. What if they didn't spend that money and instead relied on developing an open source community for their new designs? They would save money and have products developed faster.



With all of their protections, how few work on any given drug and how costly are they to develop.

Either you misstated, or you have no clue what you are talking about. "How many work on any given drug"? Even the pharmaceutical companies do not know, because they continue to work their way through hundreds or even thousands of chemical combinations before finding one that is efficacious without being harmful. Sometimes they discover a drug that does one thing while looking for a drug that does something else. This discovery process is phenomenally expensive, which is why pharmaceutical companies are so protective of what little they do know. They need the payback for that investment. Someone will make the investment, somewhere. All you are describing is redistributing wealth among the pharmaceutical companies. the costs will still be the same in aggregate.

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This discovery process is phenomenally expensive....

My point exactly. Properly embracing infinite goods can drastically lower the cost of the discovery process. To some degree this already happens in university. Pharmaceutical companies realize that universities are doing research in their field. They share their information with the universities. Universities have developed many new drugs, treatments, etc. that go on to be marketed by pharma companies.

Under the current system only select universities get to participate in the research and other individuals or groups. I believe the rate of discovery would increase significantly if pharma companies participated in the open source community.



What would happen if they shared their knowledge with the rest of the world and let scientists all over the world participate in the development of new drugs, treatments, etc. there are still some substantial manufacturing and testing costs that go into drugs so the pharmaceutical companies could still position themselves there to capture the value added to their product.

I have no idea what you just said, but scientists who have the capability to participate in the search for new drugs already do.

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Yes they already do, but they do it in an incredibly hampered way. They are bound by non-disclosure agreements and trade secrets and such. I do not believe that the best way to solve a problem is to have everything locked down where only a few people can see it and work on it.

Rather if they weren't so worried about controlling every little aspect of everything, information could flow freely and problems would be addressed by the masses instead of by the individual. The individual would still have an impact. The difference is that the success or failure of a product wouldn't hang on the efforts of only the individual.



Rather they would have 1,000's of products to market to the whole world. Their costs would come down and they would have almost every drug be profitable. How expensive is a failed drug?

You missed the point completely. The vast majority of drugs (5000:1, by some estimates), are failures. The price of trying to find a drug that does something useful. Logically:

You are seeking a drug to treat a specific condition.

You begin with basic formulas that you believe might have properties to treat the specific condition.

You test.

You analyze the result.

You reformulate.

Repeat infinitely, or until you discover something that treats the specific condition.

Each time you develop a formula that does not work, it is a failed drug. That failed drug will never be a success.

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Even if the ratios of failures to successes remains constant, having many more people working on the problem would get to results much faster. Think of it as the difference between having one processor in a computer work on something and having 100 processors work in parallel. The 100 processors will get the work done faster. And if the pharma companies aren't having to shoulder the cost of operating those 100 processors, which represent all the people in the open source community, they could dramatically decrease their costs of development.



In fact this site and others are advocating for exactly that. Because of infinite goods, the barriers to entry have changed.

Wait a moment. According to people here, infinite goods have always existed. Therefore, the "barriers to entry" could not have "changed" in response to infinite goods that have always existed.

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Yes infinite goods have always existed. What's changed is peoples access to them as well as the cost of copying them. Previous to the digital age, it was very expensive to copy music, either by hand or on a medium like a record or a CD. now music can be copied for next to nothing digitally. As these barriers fall away, the infinite goods that have always existed are now acting more like the infinite goods they are. Previously because it was so expensive, music acted a lot like a scare good. It required a lot of money to produce and distribute. Now it costs next to nothing to produce or distribute. Now music and other infinite goods can act according to their unique properties.



On one hand, you don't want a lot of barriers to entry.

As a manufacturer, the more barriers to entry that exist, the better off I am. Why would I not want a lot of barriers to entry?

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It a world where everything is expensive and resources are limited, yes barriers to entry make you better off. That's not the world we live in any more. There are resources out there, infinite goods, that are now unlimited. Trying to control everything gives you 100% of $1. Understanding infinite goods gives you 1% of $1,000,000,000...

I think i covered why most barriers to entry are bad in the previous post. Let me know if you want to go over it again.



Look at Red Hat...So why aren't there innumerable competitors in this space? Because Red Hat has their reputation as a barrier to entry.

Well, engine manufacturers have hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investment as a barrier to entry in manufacturing engines.

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we are in agreement



However, there is no barrier to entry in inventing new engine features. Indeed, engine manufacturers have largely "open sourced" their technology through thousands of patents.

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Patents do not create open source communities. The enforcement of patents actively deter the work of an open source community. Yes the patent is published, but no one is free to build on that information without having to go through the patent process themselves. It is all very costly and prohibitive.



However, in spite of the benefits of participating in the design of new engines, which anyone, anywhere is free to do (your "infinite good"), few people do. Why?

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Few people do because currently there are massive negatives in the form of patents and litigation. If you took a Hemi engine and improved upon it and then tried to put that product back in the market you would be sued by Dodge. They would use their patents as a barrier and come after you. That is why few people do.



Well, internal to companies that produce products such as engines, transmission, cars, planes, etc., there is the realization that the "infinite good" is worthless until the efficacy of the "infinite good" has been verified. So, time to build the expensive prototype and test it.

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I've said over and over here that the use of infinite goods can drastically reduce the expensive part of prototyping.



When the "infinite good" has the same value that others here think it does (meaning, zero), then another solution must be tested. The aggregate of companies that make a specific product have to choose which solutions they test because such tests are expensive.



The cost of finding solutions is the significant barrier to entry.

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This cost of finding the solution is carried by the open source community. The reason they carry the cost is because in an open source community, they also benefit monetarily or otherwise from the discovery of the solution.



The lack of available participants to finding solutions is a barrier to entry.

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As I said above, the lack of active participants comes from the negatives that are inherent in patent protection. Look at any well developed open source project. There is no lack of participants.



The lack of appeal in designing engines is a barrier to entry.

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I addressed this as well. The lack of appeal will change once communities are engaged throughout their entire lives the way open source does. Yes, there are children that are coding for open source projects.



So far this has been an excellent conversation. Keep it coming. :)

this conversation is going really well :) i'll have a response for you later today. either at lunch or after work.

just realized that i didn't mention the 2nd problem. Chilling effects. one a few peoples heads get cut off, no one wants to be the next in line.

this is a problem because all these people who are threatened with having their heads figuratively cut off want to build on top of the current IP that's out there. they want to add value.

all of this can make the market bigger for everyone.

This time around i'm only going to address certain things so that this conversation doesn't get even more muttled.

I think I must have missed those scenarios. Can you point them out to me?
If you use techdirt.com's search and search the term infinite goods, you should find a lot of our previous discussion. Also a really great place to start reading about infinite goods on Techdirt would be here:

The Grand Unified Theory of the Economics of Free

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070503/012939.shtml

read the whole post and then read all the posts it links too. It's a really good primer. As you're reading, realize that what you already know isn't wrong. What you know is just being expanded. Many of the same things you already know still remain true. The ones that change should be obvious and logical.


A great deal has been said about patents. One thing that I want to state in this conversation is that patents work in the sense that they make money for the stake holders. Yes, millions of patents and millions of dollars. There are 2 problems with patents. They are inherently limiting. By allowing one person to control the destiny of an idea or any infinite good so much is missed. Their one take on the idea is successful if they are thriving in the marketplace. But what about all the value that the rest of the world could build on top of it and the creator could capture. Those that accept infinite goods would probably accept the premise of that patents are like owning 100% of $1. it's all yours. You built it alone. You own it alone. A world without patents could be compared to having 1% of a $google. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000....... you don't control it all. You dont' capture it all. Conversly, you don't make it all, you don't pay for it all. The 1% that you've captured is hugely more profitable than 100% of anything that you could build of only your own efforts.

Sorry it took so long to get back. Work and then dinner with extended family.

I'll address some of them here and then some of them in your next response since you added some good points there.

Anyone can use his business model.

I suspect that...

most of the things you listed are scarce goods, however most of them are also a bundle of scare and infinite goods. Increasing either the value or the amount of the infinite goods in these bundles could certainly add value for these products.

Engine – one of the infinite goods I can identify in an engine is the design. Engine designs have been changing and improving over time. I imagine there is quite a bit of development cost in developing proprietary engines. There's the initial development costs, the costs to protect them with patents, the costs to maintain all the secret information, the cost to bring new people up to speed on your proprietary information and the risk that all of these costs ultimately could fail in the market place. What would happen if engine makers open sourced the design side, ie. the infinite goods side, of their business and focused on the manufacturing side. The chip maker AMD is doing something similar to this. What would happen is the cost of developing the infinite good would drop to near zero. Tens of thousands would join the current hundreds in working on every facet of modern engines. This lowers the initial development cost as well as decreases the cost of replacement for employees. Now you have a large pool of experienced developers to choose from if you want one in house. His learning curve would be no where near as steep as with proprietary information. So there would be 2 huge savings in this model. The engine manufacturer could focus on manufacturing techniques, efficiencies, etc. Could anyone copy their business model? Yes, but like in baseball or any other sport, everyone is doing the same thing. There are those that do it exceptionally well and get paid millions and those that are only average and get paid pennies comparatively.

Car – this is a really fascinating place to watch the implementation of infinite goods. Look at recent offerings like Sync to play your music in your car. Car companies are recognizing that people are consuming more and more infinite goods and are adding value to their scare good, the car, by incorporating ways to consume infinite goods. See all the stuff about design of engines above. It could also apply to cars. Another place that infinite goods are going to get really interesting with cars is all of the computer hardware and software that is going into them. From guidance to maintenance systems. More and more what we call a car is becoming a computer with wheels. As cars and computers continue to intersect infinite goods such as software, music, movies, art, etc. drive the value of the of the car much like they do computer hardware.

Plane – engines, cars & planes are all similar enough mechanically that I don't think I need to address it again here. There is one place that infinite goods are aiding airlines and by extension planes. In the manipulation of their data such as schedules, ticket sales, etc. look at all of the intellectual property, other wise known as infinite goods, that has been built up around the airplane. Hotwire, Priceline, Orbitz, Expedia. Also on the construction end. Since planes cost so much to build, their manufactures would and do benefit from software that streamlines their inventory and manufacturing processes. I think I went over how opening all of this up can improve things. Basically let the market do the heavy lifting of the creating. Seed it by putting an idea out there. Let people build all kinds of interesting stuff on it. This adds value. Then learn the best way to implement these things inside the bundles of scare and infinite goods that are your products.

pharmaceutical manufacturers – now these guys are fun. An example that's used over and over here is the fashion industry. Right now they have little to know IP protection. So they fight fiercely among themselves to stay fresh, hip, modern, fashionable. They are constantly innovating. Basically fashion is a huge knowledge industry. The manufacturing techniques of Louis Vuiton and the Gap aren't really all that different. It's the knowledge and reputation, both infinite goods, that differentiate the products. The same could be true of the pharmaceutical industry. With all of their protections, how few work on any given drug and how costly are they to develop. What would happen if they shared their knowledge with the rest of the world and let scientists all over the world participate in the development of new drugs, treatments, etc. there are still some substantial manufacturing and testing costs that go into drugs so the pharmaceutical companies could still position themselves there to capture the value added to their product. Yes, they would no longer have one blockbuster, like say Viagra, to market to the whole world. Rather they would have 1,000's of products to market to the whole world. Their costs would come down and they would have almost every drug be profitable. How expensive is a failed drug?



In fact this site and others are advocating for exactly that. Because of infinite goods, the barriers to entry have changed.

I think I addressed design above. Let me touch a little bit more on barriers to entry. On one hand, you don't want a lot of barriers to entry. You want as many people to understand what you're up to as possible. Many hands make light work and all that. You want millions of eye balls and millions of brains all working on your problems. Think of infinite goods as being a SETI program for humans. The barriers that will differentiate will be things like attention, reputation, access and time. Those that gain the attention of the market will have an advantage as always. With infinite goods, now it's infinitely more valuable with so many different things competing for attention. Reputation, I think this one goes without saying. One quick example though. Metalica built up a reputation of making great music for their genre. Then they developed a reputation as being 'evil' when they sued their own fans and tried to suppress Napster. For all the years they built up their good reputation, they destroyed it pretty quickly and gained a negative reputation. They are now working on repairing the damage to their reputation that their actions caused. Access as been addressed over and over on Techdirt so i'll leave it at that. Time is going to become more and more valuable. As information continues to flow and people understand more and more things, their time becomes valuable. For example, I will probably never work on my own car. I understand a great deal about my car and how to maintain it, but I feel that it is worth it for me to pay someone else skilled in maintenance to do it for me. I value the other things I know how to do more than I value the costs I would save doing the maintenance on my own vehicle.

Look at Red Hat. They offer all their products for free. Anyone can download them and anyone can distribute them. Heck, anyone can do exactly what Red Hat does and charge for services like set up, optimization, enterprise, etc. So why aren't there innumerable competitors in this space? Because Red Hat has their reputation as a barrier to entry.

I think Mike covered this well.

Business models that incorporate infinite goods are winning in the market place.

You don't just own infinite goods by themselves. You also own numerous products that are a scare good bundled with an infinite good. You also own products that are 2 or more infinite goods bundled together. The point of understanding infinite goods is to say there's one way of doing something. The point is that because infinite goods are well infinite, they insert a Zero into all of the businesses models already out there and make it possible for the creation of many new and profitable ones. When an input to a business model costs Zero that really changes things for the better.

This article about Lee is shown as yet another example. Without infinite goods, what would Lee or anyone else have to do to get every major company in your field to come to you unsolicited and offer you $$$? Lee achieved this result with minimal cost. All he did was share his idea and help push it out to as many people as wanted it.

No idea about the vegematic. Could you send me the link? Okay, Lee is one example that works. The point is that he's yet another example of someone understanding infinite goods and making it work for them. Infinite goods can work in numerous ways.

infinite goods is not about eliminating IP.

Mike addressed this.

it's rather about pointing out the nature of ideas and infinite goods being in conflict with artificial scarcity. patents and other forms of intellectual property create artificial scarcity in infinite goods.

Mike addressed this.

working on a response to this. good conversation. i should have something tonight or at the latest tomorrow morning. it's been a busy day.

1) We do not know if Johnny Chung Lee invented anything because he has not had his work reviewed and validated with a patent examination.
this is semantics. whether or not Lee had his work reviewed and 'validated' with a patent examination is irrelevant. Lee chose to put his ideas out in the marketplace and they have been shown to have numerous benefits to both himself and the marketplace as a whole. whether you call it invention, or innovation, or some other word, Lee has done something important.

2) If Johnny Chung Lee actually has produced significant inventions his aspirations are way too low. Working for a big company is rarely in the interest of a real inventor.
again with the semantics. the significance of is work has already been shown in the marketplace. the market has already valued his contribution. thousands of people around the world are using his work. his whiteboard is being used in classrooms. even the students are comprehending it and demonstrating it. businesses also valued his work. they made UNSOLICITED offers to him. previous to infinite goods, what would you have to accomplish to have every major company in your field come to you unsolicited and let you write your own ticket? whatever it was, it would cost several times more than what Lee spent spreading his ideas far and wide.

whether or not he falls into a definition of 'real' is immaterial.


3) Patents are still mandatory if the inventor expects to receive fair value. Getting a job is not fair value.
no they are not. the value has moved. it is no only to be found in scarcity. the value is still there for the inventor/innovator to capture. the only difference is that now they have to capture it differently. Also, there is far more value to capture now then there has been under the artificial scarcity of patents.

a quick tangent to patent attorneys in this. they will still be valuable in a world of infinite goods, but they too will have to change where they collect value from. specifically, they understand intellectual property far beyond the average. rather than use that knowledge to try to limit something that inherently doesn't have limits, they can use their advanced knowledge to add value and capture it.

as has been mentioned above, the point of this article is not "an inventor got a job". the point is that something amazing happened. every major company in Lee's field was competing for him. they offered to let him write his own ticket. so he did. he chose Microsoft because he felt that it would allow him to reach more people. that is what he determined to be the 'fair value'.

would not every inventor/innovator love to have every company in their field clamoring to work with them? Lee could have just as easily worked as a consultant or as a contractor or decided that he wanted to be a VP of something. the point is that his use of infinite goods and his work spreading his idea led to the result of his entire industry wanting to pay him UNSOLICITED. the other point is that this can be reproduced.


4) While getting a patent is likely to lead to a fight with a patent pirating transnational the good news is that today there are plenty of patent enforcement companies and contingency litigators ready and willing to extract fair value out of the thieves. A fringe benefit is seeing them whine about so called trolls followed by seeing those companies handed their heads at trial.
what these patent enforcement companies are finding out is that it is very hard and very expensive to limit something that is infinite. they're standing in the middle of a river trying to stop it's flow with their hands. trials have the short term benefit of extracting a comparatively small some from an individual. what doesn't seem to be taken into consideration is the collateral damage that is done to your own customers and your own market. you make your customers criminals and breed distrust of your company. you create a huge net negative. why use your products when they come with the risk of being dragged in front of a judge. in time, replacement products will take over the customers and the market.


5) Thank you for joining the conversation. Someone with a background like yours should have a lot to add to this conversation.