Chapter One: What Is Intellectual Usability And Why Is It Important?

In my childhood, there were some toys that shaped the way I look at the world. One such toy was a collection of little bricks, which allowed me to create all sorts of things. Legos. I built houses, cars, and many other things that came with the instructions for the set - painstakingly mocking what was shown on the front of the box, or following the pictured instructions on how to build things.

The true joy of these Legos, though, was not having to mimic. I could do whatever I wanted to do with them. Before Lego came out with their Space series, I had spaceships. I'll have you know that I had built spaceships with mundane Legos which were faster than the Millennium Falcon, and better armed than Death Star. I remember using the little lamp legos (one peg on top) as either 'engines', or adding the little round yellow or red cylinders as the guns. For movable cannon, the legs of some 'Lego Man' would work just fine. As I recall, that spaceship met it's demise when it encountered the only thing more powerful than it: A Vacuum Cleaner.

You see, Lego's are intellectually usable. Yes, Lego is a registered Trademark of the Lego Group. Yes, they have all of their rights reserved. That's their intellectual property. But they also allow the users of Legos - from children to adults (I still have my Lego Mindstorms) to use their product to create things. To 'remix' the box of Legos. To build whatever we feel like with whatever is on hand. So intellectual property and intellectual usability don't have to be separate. It's a balance, and the laws related to intellectual property affect how intellectually usable something is. There are many good books about intellectual property law, and I recommend that those interested read them - this book is not one of them. This is just about usability, and the importance of usability to individuals, societies and the entire world.

There's no 'Lego Industry Association of America' which sues children and talks about how they are being robbed by children. So there's a balance that has been struck, and has worked pretty well. I can talk about Legos to just about anyone in my age group, and we all know exactly what we're talking about. We may not have built the same things, but we shared the same joy of building, and using our imagination.

I had other toys that I remember with the same fondness. I had an Erector Set, which allowed me to use all kinds of stuff from the garage to create things. Unfortunately, it's probably because my father appreciated his tools that this particular toy wasn't invested in more. There was a Star Wars robot manufacturing kit, the Radio Shack electronics kit, and so on.

Then there was my first encounter with 'intellectual property law'. It wasn't a law of a country, but it was quite similar. My father had purchased - he said for me - a Capsela set. He worked nights, so he was home during the day, and he would build really cool things with this set. He built a real four wheel drive vehicle, and a six wheel drive vehicle. He built these things during the day while I was at school, and forbid me to use them in the evening while he was at work. So my father unwittingly introduced me to the bad side of 'intellectual property law'. The Capsela set was very intellectually usable, but the intellectual usability was hampered by law. Well, at least my intellectual usability was hampered in this regard: My father retained all the intellectual usability. He retained the usability. It was clearly his property, and he gave me no license other than to 'use under his supervision'.

Intellectual Usability isn't the opposite of intellectual property, it isn't going to make your life better and it's unlikely to be the next meme. It's not going to make you a better person, and it won't prevent your children from being born naked. It's not a sales pitch, it's not a philosophy, it's not political, and it isn't prejudiced.

What Intellectual Usability is, however, is a measure of how usable intellectual property is. By itself, it means nothing - it requires a perspective. This particular book is (to be) written with the general perspective of the global society, but in exploring the concepts associated with it, other perspectives will have to be examined. The mathematically or scientifically inclined reader may see intellectual usability as a form of coefficient of intellectual property, though this is not entirely true.

How does one measure how usable something is? One cannot measure how usable something is, because there's no way to judge how creatively an item can be used. The home computer, by itself, is an example of something which is more usable than the original designers probably considered. If you were to have told Babbage of the use of computers in a network to communicate, he probably would have looked at you funny. If you mentioned downloading music and video, he may even have hit you with an object which he found handy at the time. Yet - the home computer is used for these things, and many more. We can explore with it on the internet, we can communicate with it, and we can use it to research the computer even more. We can buy things from distant parts of the world and, through the grace of a logistics framework that has kept pace with the Internet, have it delivered to our doorstep faster than Charles Babbage could have built his mechanical computer.

There's no way to measure how intellectually usable something is by looking at things within this particular extreme, because the potential for use of intellectual property is infinite, or close to it. Whoever first rolled a round object down a hill probably never considered how important that discovery was to mankind - and probably didn't expect to hear about it being patented. In fact, the circular transportation facilitation device was patented in 2001. But what if we look at things the other way?

What if someone has a brilliant idea and dies before they can share it? That would be of absolutely no intellectual use to any of us, simply because we wouldn't have it available. We wouldn't even miss it, because we wouldn't know about it. The cure for Cancer, HIV or the common cold may have been thought of by people who couldn't express it before they died - it's unlikely, we may think, but it is possible. But from this example, we can see that what we do not know is not intellectually usable. What is not available to us is not usable, and if it deals with intangibles such as intellectual property, it is not intellectually usable.

To someone with no access to a computer, the entire internet is completely unusable. All the content available on the internet is not intellectually usable to them - in fact, it would be completely intellectually unusable. This is black and white, it's easy to see. But, as in the example of the Digital Divide, there are many shades of intellectual usability. While in some parts of the world there are people with absolutely no internet access which constitute the Digital Divide, there are people in other countries who consider a lack of bandwidth to be a 'Digital Divide'. Why? The reason is simple. The demand for more intellectual usability; the demand for more information. Intellectual Usability is needed for growth in developing areas - not just countries - as we'll discuss later.

If someone requires a lot of bandwidth to view information across the internet, then even a small amount of bandwidth could equate to zero intellectual usability when it comes to the information. By not being accessible, information is not intellectually usable. It simply does not exist for some people. No matter how easy it is to find information with a search engine such as Google, it's useless to people who cannot access the search engine. So we can say how intellectually usable something is by describing how intellectually usable it isn't.

In the case of intellectual property, the intellectual usability of the property for the owner is obviously infinite. But depending on how accessible they make it to society, it will probably not be as usable to society. This is, for better or worse, where Intellectual Property Law comes into play.

Intellectual Property Law has suffered many changes, as Lawrence Lessig explains in detail within his book Free Culture. His book shows the changes that have been made in Laws within the United States have shaped present Intellectual Property Law - and how present Intellectual Property Law stifles innovation on many different levels. He writes of changes that could be made, and probably should be made. But he's not fighting for intellectual usability, he's fighting for a better balance of intellectual usability for society within the Law.

A Few Words On Intellectual Property Laws and Intellectual Usability

Public Domain is intellectually usable to whoever can access it. If we wanted 100% intellectual usability for society, we could scrap all intellectual property laws and force everthing into the public domain - which is exactly where we, as a society, came from. While this idea may be attractive to some, it's not necessarily good - it does stifle innovation and creativity since it does not reward people and even organizations who exhibit these traits.

It's necessary to get this out of the way before delving further into Intellectual Usability. Without a brief discussion on this, people may think that tossing everything into the Public Domain is exactly the point of this whole book, which it is not. It's about making people aware of Intellectual Usability as a concept, and in doing so making them more aware of balances which must be struck throughout the world - not only in the Laws of countries, but in the psyche of the societies which passively or actively support these Laws.

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The Public Domain is a wonderful thing, but it has a serious flaw. Lessig mentions it in Chapter One: Creators of Free Culture:

In 1928, the culture that Disney was free to draw upon was

relatively fresh. The public domain in 1928 was not very old and

was therefore quite vibrant. The average term of copyright was just

around thirty years�for that minority of creative work that

was in fact copyrighted.⁴ That means that for thirty

years, on average, the authors or copyright holders of a creative

work had an �exclusive right� to control certain uses

of the work. To use this copyrighted work in limited ways required

the permission of the copyright owner.

At the end of a copyright term, a work passes into the public

domain. No permission is then needed to draw upon or use that work.

No permission and, hence, no lawyers. The public domain is a

�lawyer-free zone.� Thus, most of the content from the

nineteenth century was free for Disney to use and build upon in

1928. It was free for anyone� whether connected or not,

whether rich or not, whether approved or not�to use and build

upon.

The problem with immediately placing things in the Public Domain is that nobody would honor anyone else's work, and people who innovated would be unable to gain recompense - let alone attribution - for their very work. Yet a Public Domain is necessary, and as Lessig points out, done properly it allows creators to gain from creation, while allowing the general public to use the public domain in a fairly short period of time. That, unfortunately, has changed. But placing things immediately into the Public Domain is problematic, and is therefore not a very good solution. There's no reward for creating.

On the flip side, without placing things in the public domain, we rob people of mankind's heritage. Consider a world where there was no Project Gutenberg - where people would not have free access to information which has become 'common knowledge'. If there is a certainty that immediately placing things in the Public Domain stifles creativity of individuals who are so inclined, there is also a certainty that if mankind's creativity is stifled without a timely allowance for things to enter the Public Domain. At present, we are effectively building a library and removing the books.

Intellectual Property Law is needed to assure that creativity continues, which seems counterproductive to intellectual usability. Yet intellectual usability, like everything else, cannot exist on it's own.

A man I respect, Richard Stallman, says that the term 'Intellectual Property Law' is confusing. He's right, but after much thought I do not know that there is a better term for it, much like the terms Free Software and Open Source can be said to be confusing.

Free Software confuses the uninitiated because of the global use of the English word Free to be something which has no cost. Meanwhile, Open Source suffers a similar problem, where there is confusion as to whether software is Open Source just because the source code is available. Both camps of software philosophy are distinct, but have common areas of interest.

Beyond Intellectual Property

In the end, we must realize that words are not our masters, but instead we are the masters of words. We define what words mean. Consider that presently Google is synonymous with searching for things on the internet. It didn't mean that before. Mankind has ever been the master of it's language, yet we have problems agreeing on our own definitions of words. Perhaps we should make it fall under Intellectual Property Law to address these issues; leaving it to 'Masters of the English Language' to define what each word means?

And why stop there? Why not have Intellectual Property Law cover the Human Genome Project, so that we can choose who has legal access to information that relates to mankind's physical survival?

The intellectual usability of Language and Genetics transcends - or should - Intellectual Property Laws. This is about society, about culture, about mankind. It's about survival in an environment which we no longer only adapt to - it's about survival in an environment that we create. The amount of society which has information such as this readily available determines who enjoys a 'better life' now, and also determines who will continue as mankind. We're where we have been at any moment in the past: determining who survives, and when.

This survival may not be physical. It could be a simple matter of simply creating intellectual classes - a caste system of intellectual usability. It's fairly certain that anybody reading this had ancestors who knew how to create stone tools. It's also fairly certain that our mankind's ancestors who did not use stone tools are not reading this.

Law? As Anatole France wrote (The Red Lily, 1894, chapter 7): The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.