Open Science Summit 2011: IP and the New Mercantilism: Panel: “The Future (the End?) of ‘Intellectual Property'”

by Stephan Kinsella on October 26, 2011

As noted in previous posts,¹ I spoke this past weekend on a panel at the Open Science Summit, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. My panel’s topic was “The Future (the End?) of ‘Intellectual Property.'” The video for our panel is now up, here and here, and below. My talk, “IP and the New Mercantilism,” is first, and lasts about the first 19 minutes. The slideshow I used (but did not show the audience) is also below.

[See KOL101 | The Future (the End?) of Intellectual Property (Open Science Summit, 2011) ]

My original title was “IP and the New Mercantilism,” but I think a better title is “Property and Science: The Twin Pillars of Prosperity and Civilization–versus Patent and Copyright.”

The Future (the End?) of “Intellectual Property” from Open Science Summit on FORA.tv

As I noted in previous posts (Open Science versus Intellectual Property and Kinsella on Panel at Open Science Summit), this is a fascinating and promising movement/group that is devoting a great deal of attention to how IP affects science (for more on the OSS, see The Open Science Shift, Xconomy; Open science: a future shaped by shared experience, The Guardian; footage from last year’s summit is available on the OSS Youtube channel).

In fact a good deal of the Opening Session of the 2010 Open Science Summit was devoted to IP horror stories and ways in which it interferes with science and the spread of knowledge (go to about 8:20 for the beginning of this discussion).

For a related talk, “Science is a Private Good – Or: Why Government Science is Wasteful” (video; audio; and below) delivered at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey,² by Terence Kealey, a biochemist at the University of Buckingham and author of Sex, Science and Profits and The Economic Laws of Scientific Research.