It follows that spillover – the fact that others pinch your ideas – is not an accidental and tiresome drawback for the inventor. It is the whole point of the exercise. By spilling over, an innovation meets other innovations and mates with them.
Ideas Mate
Weak IP accelerates innovation through collaborative copying.
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Many of the workers lived and ate together in the quarters upstairs. The paintings and objects were not signed; they were not intended to be works of individual expression. Most were collaborative efforts, including many of the paintings commonly attributed to Verrocchio himself.
The Japanese were pressured into signing international patent and copyright agreements, but they ignored them. ‘That [the agreements] posed no effective obstacle to Japanese copying of foreign designs,’ wrote the Japan historian William Lockwood, ‘was a constant complaint of manufacturers abroad.’ ... Less frequently, foreign technology was copied and cleverly upgraded, as with the Toyoda automatic loom, which was sold back to the home of modern textiles, Britain.
This gray relationship between companies and entrepreneurs is just one manifestation of a much broader cultural gap between the East and the West. The West has a “broadcast” view of IP and ownership: good ideas and innovation are credited to a clearly specified set of authors or inventors, and society pays them a royalty for their initiative and good works. China has a “network” view of IP and ownership: one attains the far-reaching sight necessary to create good ideas and innovations by standing on the shoulders of others, and people trade these ideas as favors.
Spacewar highlighted three aspects of the hacker culture that became themes of the digital age. First, it was created collaboratively. “We were able to build it together, working as a team, which is how we liked to do things,” Russell said. Second, it was free and open-source software. “People asked for copies of the source code, and of course we gave them out.”
This was a fairly good example of the kind of growth that creative copying could encourage: a sort of subroutine reincarnation in which a programmer developed tools that far transcended derivative functions. One day, John’s subroutines would be modified and used in even more spectacular form. This was a natural, healthy outgrowth of the application of hacker principles.
Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. Or, less formally, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: "Linus's Law".