A changed understanding of Interlectual Property

In my Article about the Metaverse and why it is not yet here, I point at a required change to our understanding of Interlectual Property.

To reiterate, we need a changed understanding of what makes interlectual property. There is a lot going on around you already changing this and business as well as law has to play catch-up a lot.

Look at fan-edits of movies:

A complete recreation of a piece of silicon from the original Amiga in Minecraft:

Black Mesa

and many more.

Obviously I think Open-Source plays a huge role this. Not just, because it changed business and the understanding of how to make money with software, but because it changed society’s expectation about what is owned by whom.

Software is not owned by corporations anymore, instead communities and users are the actual owners. This to me seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as our service-oriented product-age is routed in “the customer is always right”, which could be exagerated to “the customer dictates what the product is”.

Although this is not how things work, as obviously customers can only decide on what is available on the market, it is very obvious that customers are empowered more and more (by software especially).

Thus the distinction between customer and producer are blurred and the same goes for what is a product and what is an ingredient.

Modding, Remixing and Public Domain are very important concepts of this overall trend and I am very much looking forward what we will see happening in this space in the near future.