I've been watching Jamie Love of CPTech
long enough now to have a feel for his technique. And it's fascinating.
Jamie's technique is to redefine terms, make unsustainable assertions, leverage chatter, and talk too long.
First, he redefines terms. In his presentation today, for instance, he defined intellectual property assets as both "things you own" and "things nobody owns." Now, there are certainly plenty of things that nobody owns, but they're NOT intellectual property. Even if they have value, they are not property. By definition, property IS something that is owned.
Then, Jamie makes unsustainable assertions. I can't possibly list all the unsustainable assertions that he has made, but this morning he asserted that knowledge should be openly and freely shared (and thus not protected by IP rights) "when placing knowledge into the public domain promotes social welfare or protects human rights." Now, where to begin? Who gets to decide whether it "promotes social welfare"? Who gets to decide what "social welfare" is? Or "human rights," for that matter?
Also, Jamie leverages chatter. What I mean here is that he takes something that is trivial or unimportant, and treats it as if it is very significant and an example for others to follow. Here are some examples:
Jamie's technique is to redefine terms, make unsustainable assertions, leverage chatter, and talk too long.
First, he redefines terms. In his presentation today, for instance, he defined intellectual property assets as both "things you own" and "things nobody owns." Now, there are certainly plenty of things that nobody owns, but they're NOT intellectual property. Even if they have value, they are not property. By definition, property IS something that is owned.
Then, Jamie makes unsustainable assertions. I can't possibly list all the unsustainable assertions that he has made, but this morning he asserted that knowledge should be openly and freely shared (and thus not protected by IP rights) "when placing knowledge into the public domain promotes social welfare or protects human rights." Now, where to begin? Who gets to decide whether it "promotes social welfare"? Who gets to decide what "social welfare" is? Or "human rights," for that matter?
Also, Jamie leverages chatter. What I mean here is that he takes something that is trivial or unimportant, and treats it as if it is very significant and an example for others to follow. Here are some examples:
- Because there has been some discussion of patent policy in the U.S., Jamie is constantly talking about how "there is lots of discussion in this U.S. as to whether patents are too long or too easily granted." The implication is that, if even the U.S. thinks they've been doing it all wrong, surely developing countries should not follow their lead.
- Jamie is constantly touting H.R. 417 which, as I've already described, is a trivial bill that Jamie has leveraged as if it's coming up for a vote any day now before the full House.
- Jamie is constantly touting IBM's open source initiative. Everyone who knows what is going on understands that IBM is (legitimately) simply pursuing a competitive strategy against Microsoft. And that's fine. But it's not as if IBM has undergone a Free Culture conversion. We'll know when IBM has become a Free Culture company when it starts giving away the source code for WebSphere and Lotus Domino.
- Jamie loves IBM's patent giveaway. Again, IBM has released into the public domain a set of patents, and they have done this for their own PR and/or competitive purposes.
- Jamie constantly talks about bad patents. The fact of the matter is that bad patents are a malfunction of the patent system which should be corrected, not an indication that the patent system itself is dysfunctional.
- Jamie champions open source as a model
of development. The fact is that open source has only been successful in
niche markets. It has NOT broken into the mass market, and thus is NOT
a model for development of mass market products. It remains for open source
to prove that it can develop mass market products.
Finally, Jamie talks too long. In April at the IIM, he was the ONLY speaker to be cut off by the Chairman, and this morning he had to be handed a note by the moderator telling him to stop. So he's as undisciplined in his time management as he is in his thinking.