David Weinberger Quotes
It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.
Weinberger, David. Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room. Basic Books, 2012.
Even before being an independent country, America had two contrasting and contradictory views of patents—the one that Franklin herein states and the one what was written into the constitution that argued that by granting patents inventors would be incentivized to make their trade secrets public if they had an exclusive monopoly on if for a period of time. Both of these philosophies towards patents have coexisted since then. There was a Federal patent system for those who wanted to use it, and for those who did not, they could enter the invention to the public domain as Franklin urged. Arguably, we have obtained the best of both approaches. Millions of patents have been filed and granted and yet some of the most important inventions have followed the Franklin approach. See the quotes about the Salk Polio Vaccine—{29154} and {29187} and the quote on "open source" computer software—{29676}. With billions of dollars being made by protected software in the early 21st century, over half of the world's computers were operating on systems that was public domain and without charge as just one large example of the Franklin philosophy still coexisting.
One of the reasons that Alexander was able to conquer and control so much of the world at the time was his concept of decentralization of leadership, management, and delegation of authority. This was very unusual and not appreciated by other rulers, including his own parents. He also did not seek personal riches or creature comforts and did not spend much time lusting after women despite the fact that his mother frequently sent them to him.
When Secretary of State, Jefferson ran the first American Patent Office. The Patent system was originally and educational program, not an intellectual property program. Inventors would keep all their technological secrets to themselves. The idea behind the original patent system was to give an inventor a limited monopoly on profiting from his invention in exchange for sharing his information and techniques with his countrymen—thus improving the technological competency of the entire society. The very first patents were available for public inspection for that reason. And even today, copies of patents are available easily for almost no cost. And few American ideas worked as well as our early patent system. Through its educational role and technology transfer, America came from technological nowhere to being the pre-eminent inventing nation of the world. The balance between public access to invention and innovation and preservation of some rights to the creator of intellectual property is key to modern development.
David Weinberger (born 1950) is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the effect of machine learning’s complex models on business strategy and our sense of meaning; order and organization in the digital age; the networking of knowledge; the Net's effect on core concepts of self and place; and the shifts in relationships between businesses and their markets.
