In this Newyorker piece Malcolm Gladwell looks at the line that separates copyright infringement and borrowing from someone else's work as part of a creative process. He wrote it after a playwright used some quotes from one of his Newyorker articles in a play.
Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.
And this is the second problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity. We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another—think how many serial-killer novels have been cloned from “The Silence of the Lambs.” Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit). When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match” a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched” any of the Times’ words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
Or, in musical terms:
He knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence—cribbing, tweaking, transforming—were at the very heart of the creative process. True, copying could go too far. There were times when one artist was simply replicating the work of another, and to let that pass inhibited true creativity. But it was equally dangerous to be overly vigilant in policing creative expression, because if Led Zeppelin hadn’t been free to mine the blues for inspiration we wouldn’t have got “Whole Lotta Love,” and if Kurt Cobain couldn’t listen to “More Than a Feeling” and pick out and transform the part he really liked we wouldn’t have “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—and, in the evolution of rock, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a real step forward from “More Than a Feeling.” A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative
Showing posts with label intellectual property. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intellectual property. Show all posts
Thursday
Horizontal innovation networks: open source software and surfing
Eric von Hippel, Horizontal innovation networks - by and for users, 2002, MIT Sloan Working Paper
Von Hippel's horizontal innovation networks are in many ways modern day versions of collective invention. He examines various networks of users engaged in the production, distribution and consumption (use) of innovations.
Even as the intellectual property rights discussion is heating up, the evidence suggests that patents (or copyright) and licensing aren't optimal ways of appropriating returns, except in the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries -- and, therefore aren't the best way of encouraging innovation. One frequently mentioned alternative to patent regimes is the open-source movement, an example of von Hippel's horizontal networks. So, when might such horizontal innovation networks work?
User networks can function entirely independently of manufactureres when
(1) at least some users have sufficient incentive to innovate;
(2) at least some users have an incentive to voluntarily reveal their innovations, and
(3) diffusion of innovations by users is low cost and can compete with commercial production and distribution.
When only the first tow conditions hold, a patten of user innovation and trial and improvement will occur within user networks, followed by commercial manufacture and distribution of innovations that prove to be of general interest.
Non-users might also contribute to these networks (e.g. suppliers, producers of complementary products). However, this isn't necessary for them to work.
While user innovation in open source software is well known, it is not a unique case. Von Hippel's second example is high performance windsurfing. Here, users experiment with new equipment designs and techniques which are traded in the windsurfing community, mainly at competitive events where the core of the community regularly meets.
One question that often comes up in large-scale innovative collaboration is whether participants in an innovation network need to feel a sense of community. Von Hippel argues that windsurfers are members of a community (which forms the basis of trust and sharing), whereas open source programmers aren't. However, even in open source projects there may be communal norms, such as "generalized reciprocity" at work.
He cites a different concern: level of competitiveness. The effect of competition on willingness to free reveal has recently been documented by Franke and Shah (2002) in their study of four communities of sports enthusiasts ... They found that a statement regarding free revealing of innovations ... was significantly less agreed with by innovating members of the more rivalrous communities than by innovators within the less rivalrous communities ... They also found that assistance provided by one community member to another during the innovation development process was significantly less within the more competitive communities.
An interesting question raised by von Hippel at the end of the paper is whether there might be "life cycle" patterns, e.g. that user innovation is stronger in the early stages of a product's life cycle and weaker as it reaches maturity.
Summary
First, von Hippel explains why users innovate in the first place:
- In some product categories users may reasonably expect a higher reward from innovating than can manufacturers. For example, if a user firm develops a new process machine for in-house use that enables it to produce a major new product line, and keeps its innovation secret while benefiting from it, it may make more profit from that machine than would a manufacturer-innovator that must reveal the machine in order to sell it.
- Second, user innovation costs can be significantly lower than manufacturer innovation costs when the problem-solving work of innovation developers requires access to "sticky" -- costly to transfer -- information regarding user needs and the context of use. cf. Ogawa (1997)
Often lead users will be the first to innovate. Given that lead users experience needs in advance of the bulk of a target market, the nature, risks, and eventual size of that target market are often not clear to manufacturers. This lack of clarity can reduce manufacturers' incentives to innovate, and increase the likelihood that lead users will be the first to develop their own innovative solutions for needs that later prove to represent mainstream market demand.
However, even when users innovate, they need not necessarily reveal their innovations to a larger public that includes collaborators, competitors, and free riders, essentially making them a public good. Why do they?
Empirical studies show innovating users often choose to freely reveal details of their innovations to other users and to manufacturers as well. ...Free revealing can be the dominant way innovations are diffused in some fields and under some conditions. This happens when the benefits from free revealing exceed the benefits that are practically obtainable from licensing or secrecy:
- obtaining patents and licensing intellectual property may be impossible, too costly, or not an effective form of protection,
- similarly, maintaining a trade secret may be too costly or impractical once a product is on the market,
- faced with the choice between voluntary free revealing now and involuntary free revealing later, innovators may have more incentive to free reveal voluntarily, (which is what happened in Allen's study of collective invention in 19th century iron furnaces),
- in addition to Allen's findings, Harhoff et al find that an innovator may have an interest in rapid diffusion since an innovation that is freely revealed and adopted by others can become an informal standard that may preempt the development an/or commercialization of other versions of the innovation,
- as in the case of collective invention, innovators may be able to benefit through reputation increases among peers and potential employers (and firms may benefit from a reputation of being employers of contributors to open source and similar projects),
- there may be intrinsic benefits in terms of enjoyment and learning that arise from participation in horizontal innovation networks,
- finally communal norms, e.g. "generalized reciprocity," may also play a role.
Even if users free reveal, it is not clear that they will be able to diffuse the innovation. What does this depend on?
Often innovation streams that have a large cumulative impact are likely to be made up of relatively small individual innovations. We have also seen ... that benefits to innovators from free-revealing, while higher than benefits they could expect from licensing or secrecy, may well be low. On this basis we speculate that most innovations diffused via a user innovation network are likely to be of relatively low benefit to both diffusers and adopters, and so must be diffused at a low cost if they are to be diffused at all.
Von Hippel's horizontal innovation networks are in many ways modern day versions of collective invention. He examines various networks of users engaged in the production, distribution and consumption (use) of innovations.
Even as the intellectual property rights discussion is heating up, the evidence suggests that patents (or copyright) and licensing aren't optimal ways of appropriating returns, except in the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries -- and, therefore aren't the best way of encouraging innovation. One frequently mentioned alternative to patent regimes is the open-source movement, an example of von Hippel's horizontal networks. So, when might such horizontal innovation networks work?
User networks can function entirely independently of manufactureres when
(1) at least some users have sufficient incentive to innovate;
(2) at least some users have an incentive to voluntarily reveal their innovations, and
(3) diffusion of innovations by users is low cost and can compete with commercial production and distribution.
When only the first tow conditions hold, a patten of user innovation and trial and improvement will occur within user networks, followed by commercial manufacture and distribution of innovations that prove to be of general interest.
Non-users might also contribute to these networks (e.g. suppliers, producers of complementary products). However, this isn't necessary for them to work.
While user innovation in open source software is well known, it is not a unique case. Von Hippel's second example is high performance windsurfing. Here, users experiment with new equipment designs and techniques which are traded in the windsurfing community, mainly at competitive events where the core of the community regularly meets.
One question that often comes up in large-scale innovative collaboration is whether participants in an innovation network need to feel a sense of community. Von Hippel argues that windsurfers are members of a community (which forms the basis of trust and sharing), whereas open source programmers aren't. However, even in open source projects there may be communal norms, such as "generalized reciprocity" at work.
He cites a different concern: level of competitiveness. The effect of competition on willingness to free reveal has recently been documented by Franke and Shah (2002) in their study of four communities of sports enthusiasts ... They found that a statement regarding free revealing of innovations ... was significantly less agreed with by innovating members of the more rivalrous communities than by innovators within the less rivalrous communities ... They also found that assistance provided by one community member to another during the innovation development process was significantly less within the more competitive communities.
An interesting question raised by von Hippel at the end of the paper is whether there might be "life cycle" patterns, e.g. that user innovation is stronger in the early stages of a product's life cycle and weaker as it reaches maturity.
Summary
First, von Hippel explains why users innovate in the first place:
- In some product categories users may reasonably expect a higher reward from innovating than can manufacturers. For example, if a user firm develops a new process machine for in-house use that enables it to produce a major new product line, and keeps its innovation secret while benefiting from it, it may make more profit from that machine than would a manufacturer-innovator that must reveal the machine in order to sell it.
- Second, user innovation costs can be significantly lower than manufacturer innovation costs when the problem-solving work of innovation developers requires access to "sticky" -- costly to transfer -- information regarding user needs and the context of use. cf. Ogawa (1997)
Often lead users will be the first to innovate. Given that lead users experience needs in advance of the bulk of a target market, the nature, risks, and eventual size of that target market are often not clear to manufacturers. This lack of clarity can reduce manufacturers' incentives to innovate, and increase the likelihood that lead users will be the first to develop their own innovative solutions for needs that later prove to represent mainstream market demand.
However, even when users innovate, they need not necessarily reveal their innovations to a larger public that includes collaborators, competitors, and free riders, essentially making them a public good. Why do they?
Empirical studies show innovating users often choose to freely reveal details of their innovations to other users and to manufacturers as well. ...Free revealing can be the dominant way innovations are diffused in some fields and under some conditions. This happens when the benefits from free revealing exceed the benefits that are practically obtainable from licensing or secrecy:
- obtaining patents and licensing intellectual property may be impossible, too costly, or not an effective form of protection,
- similarly, maintaining a trade secret may be too costly or impractical once a product is on the market,
- faced with the choice between voluntary free revealing now and involuntary free revealing later, innovators may have more incentive to free reveal voluntarily, (which is what happened in Allen's study of collective invention in 19th century iron furnaces),
- in addition to Allen's findings, Harhoff et al find that an innovator may have an interest in rapid diffusion since an innovation that is freely revealed and adopted by others can become an informal standard that may preempt the development an/or commercialization of other versions of the innovation,
- as in the case of collective invention, innovators may be able to benefit through reputation increases among peers and potential employers (and firms may benefit from a reputation of being employers of contributors to open source and similar projects),
- there may be intrinsic benefits in terms of enjoyment and learning that arise from participation in horizontal innovation networks,
- finally communal norms, e.g. "generalized reciprocity," may also play a role.
Even if users free reveal, it is not clear that they will be able to diffuse the innovation. What does this depend on?
Often innovation streams that have a large cumulative impact are likely to be made up of relatively small individual innovations. We have also seen ... that benefits to innovators from free-revealing, while higher than benefits they could expect from licensing or secrecy, may well be low. On this basis we speculate that most innovations diffused via a user innovation network are likely to be of relatively low benefit to both diffusers and adopters, and so must be diffused at a low cost if they are to be diffused at all.
Monday
Competition or cooperation?
Much has been made of the importance of alliances in the biotech industry. Large pharmaceutical firms are particularly good at testing and marketing drugs, but are facing pipeline shortages, while smaller start-ups are better at research and innovation. Alliances can help each benefit from the other. Research alliances between firms and with universities are also important drivers of innovation - as demonstrated by W. Powell and others.
Is this a phenomenon specific to biotech or a general one? Are the gales of creative destruction no longer a threat to large incumbent firms? Joshua Gans, David Hsu and Scott Stern set out to formulate some general rules in a paper presented by K@W.
The researchers found that the likelihood of start-ups cooperating with established companies depends upon three factors:
1) the strength of the startups’ intellectual property rights;
2) whether they have relationships with intermediaries such as venture capitalists; and
3) whether their industry requires big investments in things such as manufacturing and distribution.
To draw their conclusions, they surveyed 118 technology start-ups.
“In economic environments like the biotechnology industry – where patents are relatively effective in protecting [intellectual property rights], firms face high relative investment costs, and brokers are available to facilitate trade – start-up innovators tend to earn their returns from innovation through the market for ideas, acting as an upstream supplier of ‘technology’ rather than as a horizontal innovation-oriented competitor,” the authors write. “In contrast, when investment costs for the entrant are relatively low and the technological innovation is not protected by patents, as in the disk-drive industry, the disclosure threat tends to foreclose the ideas market. Start-up innovators in this environment are more likely to commercialize their innovations through product market competition.”
Patents protect start-ups from having their inventions stolen by incumbents. That, in turn, gives them greater leverage in negotiations. “Under cooperation, negotiating over the sale of an idea inevitably involves a disclosure risk, eroding the bargaining position of the start-up and reducing the incumbent’s willingness to pay,” the researchers explain. “Increasing the strength of [intellectual property rights] reduces the expropriation threat for either strategy, and thus it increases the absolute expected returns to start-up innovators.” Negotiations often lead to cooperative relationships such as joint ventures and even acquisitions.
It’s not only the small biotechs that have embraced the cooperative model of innovation, Hsu pointed out in an interview. Merck & Co., the giant drug maker based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., has made partnering a cornerstone of its strategy for bringing new drugs to the market. Two of its leading products – Fosamax, an osteoporosis drug, and Cozaar/Hyzaar, a hypertension medication – came to the company via license agreements.
Of course, negotiating, like marriage, requires a partner, and finding the right one can make the difference between happiness and divorce. But as a rule, start-ups aren’t well-suited to finding good partners. They tend to be small and thus stretched thin. What they need are matchmakers, that is, intermediaries such as venture capitalists, lawyers and accountants.
Intermediaries often specialize in particular industries, working mostly with, say, biotech or information-technology companies. As a result, they have a deep knowledge of the industry’s players; they know whether those players are looking for partners and whether they can be trusted in negotiations. Likewise, they can vouch for the value of a startup’s innovation and the ability of its founders. Hsu and his co-authors find that start-ups that work with intermediaries are more likely to choose cooperation over competition.
Finally, “As the sunk costs of product-market entry increase, the gains from trade between start-up innovators and incumbents also increase, so start-ups will be more likely to forgo competition,” they point out.
What does all this mean if you are an entrepreneur with a company or a manager within a big, established firm? Ideally, it will help you pick the right path, cooperation or competition. But as Hsu points out, no formula fits all companies within an industry. Two of the best-known and biggest biotech companies – Amgen and Genentech, both based in California – partnered early on with established companies. But they invested the earnings from those partnerships in becoming fully integrated pharmaceutical companies.
Is this a phenomenon specific to biotech or a general one? Are the gales of creative destruction no longer a threat to large incumbent firms? Joshua Gans, David Hsu and Scott Stern set out to formulate some general rules in a paper presented by K@W.
The researchers found that the likelihood of start-ups cooperating with established companies depends upon three factors:
1) the strength of the startups’ intellectual property rights;
2) whether they have relationships with intermediaries such as venture capitalists; and
3) whether their industry requires big investments in things such as manufacturing and distribution.
To draw their conclusions, they surveyed 118 technology start-ups.
“In economic environments like the biotechnology industry – where patents are relatively effective in protecting [intellectual property rights], firms face high relative investment costs, and brokers are available to facilitate trade – start-up innovators tend to earn their returns from innovation through the market for ideas, acting as an upstream supplier of ‘technology’ rather than as a horizontal innovation-oriented competitor,” the authors write. “In contrast, when investment costs for the entrant are relatively low and the technological innovation is not protected by patents, as in the disk-drive industry, the disclosure threat tends to foreclose the ideas market. Start-up innovators in this environment are more likely to commercialize their innovations through product market competition.”
Patents protect start-ups from having their inventions stolen by incumbents. That, in turn, gives them greater leverage in negotiations. “Under cooperation, negotiating over the sale of an idea inevitably involves a disclosure risk, eroding the bargaining position of the start-up and reducing the incumbent’s willingness to pay,” the researchers explain. “Increasing the strength of [intellectual property rights] reduces the expropriation threat for either strategy, and thus it increases the absolute expected returns to start-up innovators.” Negotiations often lead to cooperative relationships such as joint ventures and even acquisitions.
It’s not only the small biotechs that have embraced the cooperative model of innovation, Hsu pointed out in an interview. Merck & Co., the giant drug maker based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., has made partnering a cornerstone of its strategy for bringing new drugs to the market. Two of its leading products – Fosamax, an osteoporosis drug, and Cozaar/Hyzaar, a hypertension medication – came to the company via license agreements.
Of course, negotiating, like marriage, requires a partner, and finding the right one can make the difference between happiness and divorce. But as a rule, start-ups aren’t well-suited to finding good partners. They tend to be small and thus stretched thin. What they need are matchmakers, that is, intermediaries such as venture capitalists, lawyers and accountants.
Intermediaries often specialize in particular industries, working mostly with, say, biotech or information-technology companies. As a result, they have a deep knowledge of the industry’s players; they know whether those players are looking for partners and whether they can be trusted in negotiations. Likewise, they can vouch for the value of a startup’s innovation and the ability of its founders. Hsu and his co-authors find that start-ups that work with intermediaries are more likely to choose cooperation over competition.
Finally, “As the sunk costs of product-market entry increase, the gains from trade between start-up innovators and incumbents also increase, so start-ups will be more likely to forgo competition,” they point out.
What does all this mean if you are an entrepreneur with a company or a manager within a big, established firm? Ideally, it will help you pick the right path, cooperation or competition. But as Hsu points out, no formula fits all companies within an industry. Two of the best-known and biggest biotech companies – Amgen and Genentech, both based in California – partnered early on with established companies. But they invested the earnings from those partnerships in becoming fully integrated pharmaceutical companies.
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