Intellectual property has been a growing topic in the IT industry for a long time. But it’s long been considered “not a computer science problem” but instead “a legal problem.” The truth is that it’s both.
Moreover, trying to explain the reality of how bits work in a way lawyers understand or how intellectual property works in a way computer scientists understand has been an extremely difficult problem.
Until now.
My friend Christophe pointed me to an amazing article on the subject by Matthew Skala. The article invents a new term, which he borrows from a very 1984-like (the book, not the year) video-game, introduces it in an extremely-accessible (for non-computer scientists and non-lawyers alike) way which I think gives a lot of value and incredible insight into both sides of this increasingly important and pervasive issue. It’s a bit long, but I highly recommend reading it (half the page is comments, so don’t be scared away by the length of the page).
For those of you “hard computer scientists” who are thinking this is crap and don’t plan on reading it, maybe this will entice you: at the end he makes the argument the logic applied by DRM lawyers is the same one applied by cryptographers when discussing entropy. Non-CS folks, don’t worry, most of the article does not require understanding of such concepts.
Seriously… go read it!
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