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.

The book is a fascinating exploration of how ‘free’ really means different things to different people, and how we often confuse the two very different meanings of the word. There’s also quite a bit in there about the future of information and knowledge sharing on the web.

On a side note, one of my favourite quotes from the book:

Jason McCabe Calacanis, the editor and CEO of Silicon Alley Reporter, finally said the unsayable late in 2000, calling banner ads ‘an absolute, complete, unmitigated failure,’ and lamenting that ‘we standardized a failed concept. That’s how stupid we are in the Internet industry.’

If you’re interested, you can read the book for free online (or if you want to be old-school, buy a paper copy of the book).

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).

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).

A drop in the bucket?

With about $11.2 billion in cash reserves, shelling out around 50 million bucks doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal. With Microsoft and Yahoo set up as its biggest competitors however, one wonders if Google $11.2 billion looks small in comparison — Microsoft has around $35-40 billion in cash sitting around (although one could argue that in 2003, Yahoo was only sitting on around $2 billion).

Google: the smallest giant.

While Google holds an extremely strong position in the search engine market, the uptake on its other offerings hasn’t really been phenomenal. Microsoft and Yahoo still pretty much hold onto around 70% of the webmail market at any given time, with GMail making up a rather insignificant proportion of that market compared to the big two providers. Even with new deals showing up for YouTube, Google’s still got a long way to go to beat out Microsoft and Yahoo in their dominance of just about every market.

Back to Google’s email situation.

Releasing a product globally is getting to be more and more of a tough game to play. Having to consider copyright implications in different countries makes things much more complex — and as the GMail case demonstrates, it’s difficult enough to get it right in your own country.

But in the same breath, we should also note that only 42% are actually reading blogs via a newsreader — and these are the very same people who are inclined to answer a survey about feeds, blogs and wikis (and not a random sample of your average corporate users).

The number one concern among those corporate folks who haven’t started a blog? Time. 59% were worried that creating a blog would be too time consuming and 57% were worried about what to write about (one could argue that these are also probably the biggest reasons for the average person not starting a blog either). So what does this all boil down to in the end? Money, of course.

For anyone looking to create a blog (whether that’s a CEO or just the average web user), that person is looking for some return on the investment of time and energy they are going to devote to a blog. Calculating that return is not always easy to do.

While it’s certainly not all about the numbers, who doesn’t want to see some kind of return on their time? While the syndication of content is certainly not going anywhere, the relationship between blogging and feeds might. While 85% of people may say that blogging is not a fad, 67% also say that blogging will become a must-have marketing and communications tool.

The future of blogging in a business setting seems very uncertain — even if you’re able to track your blog very carefully in terms of metrics, how do you determine how much more approachable people felt your brand was after reading your blog?

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.