October 15, 2010. Maybe I'm a bit slow, but I recently started using Google's Reader. Last night I added another feed and found an interesting video on where ideas come from. My key take-away was the value of synthesis of other's ideas.

The video is a pretty good summary of the fellow's book. The one thing that occurred to me in watching it was the value of Copyright and Patent. The original intent of these two legal tools was to give a creator a short-term monopoly over an implementation of an idea. This exposed the idea to the general public, which in turn allowed them to innovate further. Climbing on the shoulders of those who came before. The problem comes when the period of the copyright is extended too far.

The Internet, properly employed, allows the synthesis elluded to. Those resistant to the long-term copyright have further improved the value of the Internet by allowing limited exceptions to the nearly century-old copyright standard.