Mickey isn’t the only mouse trying to wriggle out of the clutches of the masters of code.
- Animation World Network

Canada last week refused to grant a patent for a genetically modified mouse.

Unlike the US, EU and Japan, Canada denies that Harvard’s scientists invented anything when they manipulated mouse genes. Its Supreme Court says the university doesn’t deserve a patent - at least not until the politicians have had a chance to think the ethics of biotech over.
- National Post

As with Mickey, business concerns slam into public concerns here.

It doesn’t make much business sense for patented genes to be freely accessible. After all, you don’t want your rivals rummaging through your research work.

This isn’t just a standard big business line. As biotech develops, smaller firms, entrepreneurial boffins often, universities even, are entering the market as niche developers. Like artists, writers, coders and other intellectual property creators, they want to safeguard their work so they can be properly rewarded.

Fine, but when it comes to biotech, sole ownership of this kind of information isn’t in the public interest. Charging for access is likely to discourage research. Ideas develop most rapidly, most fruitfully through free exchanges of information. And it goes against common sense, moral sense, for private groups to have monopolies over such fundamental knowledge.

It’s sharing ideas that leads to innovation. The Romantic idea of the artist as a lonely genius? It’s more like Newton and Oasis and the rest of us jostling for position on the shoulders of giants.

According to Malcolm ‘Tipping Point‘ Gladwell, innovation happens when people egg each other on. Group social interaction results in radical ideas.

He looks at how Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, how Darwin, Watt and Priestley, how TV comedians Saturday Night Live got together and got down - in John Belushi’s case to coke snorting and everybody’s wife - to produce, in the end, pure genius.

Of course, innovation needs heads-down time too. The trick is to ‘combine the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity’ and create an environment that’s safe and yet stimulating.
- New Yorker

Glib? Sure, everybody nowadays loves innovation, creativity and thinking out of the rectangular container. Just needs a little singing from the same hymnbook. Buzzword bingo!

But Gladwell has a point. Creativity requires collaboration. It also requires the ability to rework ideas taken from a common stock.

Develop an existing idea so that it becomes something new and you’ll be applauded for your creativity and genius. Unless you’re hit with a cease-and-desist letter first.

The images and sounds in Illegal Art, currently at New York’s 313 Gallery, broke copyright law and so media corporations and their lawyers dragged the artists responsible to the courtroom.

Not a familiar cartoon character by Ashley Holt

Highlights include:

Without copyright term extensions, old films wouldn’t get distributed, argues the entertainment industry. ‘Indiscriminate exploitation’ by public domain copyists would reduce the flow of cash to Big Media and hence the motivation Big Media needs to ‘publish’ films.
- CS Monitor

Intellectual property academics Lawrence Lessig and Jason Schultz say that’s so much baloney. Digging around the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Schultz finds that out of the 37,000 or so movies released between 1927 and 1946, only 2,480, 6.8%, are commercially available.
- Lessig Blog

So, advice to Hollywood: why not place the whole lot in the public domain and see what happens?