The notion that ideas can be protected, like land or gold, from bandits predates Gutenberg's printing press. But only in the digital age has the concept of intellectual property set off an international free-for-all.
On the one side are the intellectual property holders, predominantly citizens of Western nations. They're squaring off against IP outlaws, who tend to live in developing countries. The propertied class loudly asserts its ownership and control. The insurgents cry for openness and exploit technological loopholes with abandon.
This clash of cultures demonstrates how intellectual property, a phrase with a tidy and proper ring, is actually a messy business. The core concept is deceptively rational: Creators of an idea deserve protection for a set period of time so that they may gainfully exploit their work. Such protections, whether through copyright or patents, have enabled great innovation; we wouldn't have antibiotics or Apple or Avril Lavigne if the brains behind them weren't allowed to capitalize on their successes. But it's not easy to tell at what point protecting yesterday's innovation is holding back tomorrow's. When does market protection become a monopoly? Who's to say when a discovery's social benefit outweighs an individual's reward? When is sharing stealing? These aren't idle questions. Affordable health care, digital piracy, genetically modified food - all come down to disputes over the limits and rewards of IP.
Against this backdrop, Wired offers an atlas of the intellectual property world. The maps and charts on the following pages show how IP enforcers are manning the ramparts while IP antagonists are challenging the protection regime. We focus on four industries: media, medicine, agriculture, and software. And while the battle rages, here and there a few pioneers are redrawing the map, marking a third way that respects patent protections and copyright controls while trying to foster more opportunities for broader access. The beginnings can be found in Linux and The Grey Album, generics and the Creative Commons. Use this atlas as a guide to two worlds in collision - and an outline of a new frontier.
Click on the images below to launch each section of The Free & The Unfree in PDF format:
