I’ve recently started reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s book Free: as in speech and beer, which I’m enjoying a great deal — and it’s one of those books that really gets you thinking differently about a variety of things. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction:

This is not a techno-anarchist manifesto advocating the destruction of the copyright system as we know it. As entertaining as that might be, this is a book for grownups.

This is not a starry-eyed paean to the wonders of e-business, nor is it a smug, self-congratulatory dismissal of the possibilities of dot-coms.

This book is an executive summary about the fraught relationship that networked society has to one word — FREE.

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While looking over NorthxEast’s excellent guide to guerilla marketing, I was reminded of something that happened months ago when I was setting up this site.

But first let me tell you something about myself . Most people don’t actually call me Lucas (my youngest sister being one of a few exceptions). While I like the name, people I know have always called me by Luke. It’s always seemed more familiar to me — and Lucas has always sounded a bit more, well, formal or something.

So naturally, when I went to look for a domain name, one the first places I went was lukemcdonnell.com. After clicking around the site for a bit, I was quite surprised to find that there was a guy out there also named Luke McDonnell, who was a rather talented comic book artist.

I was a bit disappointed that the domain name wasn’t available, but at the same time, thought it was kind of cool that I had a namesake (who was much more talented than me at drawing, I might add).

If the other Luke McDonnell and I were both corporations, I would imagine there would be some kind of lawsuit involved for copyright infringement or using a previously registered trademark (as you can tell by that, I’m not a lawyer) — perhaps based on who was born first (thereby proving previous trademark rights)? So what did I do instead? I just went to see if lucasmcdonnell.com was available.

So what’s the lesson here? Well, I struggled a bit with that. At first I thought it was about marketing myself — that I had learned that the domain didn’t really matter. But from everything I’ve done on the web, I’ve learned that a domain is actually incredibly important to the success of a site. And then I thought it was that it was the execution of the idea that counted, versus just having the idea.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s neither of these. There’s a basic human lesson here instead. This site has seen more benefits from the friends and contacts I’ve made online (and from my the friends and contacts I have offline) than from any domain name I could have chosen. It’s that technology — while it is a powerful enabler, too often becomes the focus of what we’re doing, instead of an extension of what we’re doing.

By the way, just as an aside, I would imagine that even though we both share the same name, the other Luke McDonnell and I wouldn’t really have much of a copyright issue if we were corporations — we’re not in the same industry, and I highly doubt we look the same (distinct brand recognition).

Did Google’s mail service kill another product line?

Shane Smith, CEO of Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) claims that it did. According to Smith, “Google have made a monstrous mess of their intellectual property requirements around their GMail product.” IIIR apparently had another product called ‘GMail’ before Google did — and claims that Google improperly acquired the GMail trademark.

IIIR wants Google to change the name of its email service (although they are not going to try to lay claim to the gmail.com domain). Considering all of the branding that Google has put into this mark already though, they would more than likely just look for monetary damages against Google (the GMail trademark is apparently valued at between $48 and $64 million dollars — although one has to take that with a grain of salt, considering it’s the number that IIIR has come up with).

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I recently came across the diagram below, which attempted to explain how feeds, blogs and various other parts of the content syndication process were interrelated. While this diagram was created to reflect the blog, feed and syndication situation in 2005, has that much really changed since then? Continue reading »

Techdirt has posed the question of whether it’s possible to plagiarize a photograph (Jonathan Lethem’s article The Ecstasy of Influence is particularly interesting).

Ironically, the post immediately before that is about how the patent system is keeping Indonesia from sharing avian flu samples (for more about this, check out HealthySimplicity’s post on Indonesia’s avian flu samples).

Jonathan Lethem’s argument is that all art and writing is based on what could be considered the intellectual property of others.

Even Microsoft’s newest operating system is reputed to be based on many ideas that Apple came up with.

Copyright and intellectual property, as Techdirt correctly points out, are all about incentives. In the article above, Indonesia simply has no economic incentive to share their samples with the rest of the world.

Creating incentives to allow people (and on a larger scale, organizations and countries) to share knowledge is no small task. But in this case, incentives are in place that go against the very nature of human knowledge sharing (and in this case, the progress of medical science).

At least Captain Copyright won’t be visiting anyone any time soon.

And hopefully Steve Jobs’ call to abolish digital rights management will start to catch on.