The industry of ideas: Let's protect what we create!

I had a nice break yesterday during the four-hour drive between my parents' home in Laredo and my own here in Austin. Mid-afternoon, with the scorching Texas sun reduced to pleasant warmth through my car window, there was little to do for much of the drive but sing with the radio and gaze at the flat, mesquite-studded land that would eventually give way to Austin's hill country. Until it did, the landscape didn't look all that different than, I imagine, it looked hundreds of years ago--before roads and electricity changed the world and technology changed the way the world does business.

It struck me then that I work in an industry of ideas. That if the Internet suddenly disappeared and every computer were struck down in a great blast, I would have little to show for the years I've dedicated to this industry. I would be all that was left of my ideas and what they had produced.

Strangely enough, this wasn't a depressing thought. Instead, it made me think about the fragility of intellectual property and how we should constantly safeguard it from, well, extinction. It also made me wonder about the intangibility of ideas and how it's that very same diaphanous quality that makes them utterly invincible. Even, dare I say, immortal.

That's the power of what I do. Of what we, as the creators and curators of intellectual property, do. It's something we should be intensely proud of.

27.07.2009. 19:48

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