> I have a book coming out in April that devotes considerable
> attention to this. I did not choose the title -- Steal this idea:
> the corporate confiscation of creativity.
there was an interesting exchange in Science magazine a couple week ago, around an earlier correspondence entitled "Enclosing the Research Commons", by Donald Kennedy. here's an extract from the latter:
It is approaching 60 years since Vannevar Bush and others persuaded
the U.S. government to do a remarkable thing: take resources that had
been at the disposal of the war effort and allocate them to the
support of basic research, most of it in academic institutions. It
came to be called the "Endless Frontier," a metaphor adroitly chosen
to link the promising unknowns of 20th-century science with the
promising unclaimed spaces of the 19th-century American West. The
Endless Frontier changed fundamental science from a venture dependent
on small privileged elites into a vast publicly owned enterprise.
That was the first revolution. The second, under way now, is a surge
of basic biomedical science toward the private sector, driven by the
mobilization of philanthropy and corporate risk capital. Continuing
the frontier motif, it could be called the Great Enclosure. Just as
the 19th-century frontier was transformed from public land into a
checkerboard of individually owned holdings, the largely public
domain of basic research is now moving into private
hands. Interestingly, these enclosure revolutions came about in the
same way: Both were implemented by purposeful government
intervention, accomplished through statute.
[snip]
les schaffer