It looks like Cory Doctorow has written another book. It's been out for several months, but it somehow slipped under my radar until now. I'll have to check this one out.

Cory Doctorow is pretty slick. He works for the EFF, has released two novels online under Creative Commons licenses, and is among the editors of the greatly linked (even more so now) Boing Boing.

I really liked Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. As I recall, I had been thinking along the lines of the book with respect to wuffie and so forth for some time before I read it. When I read it, I was very excited that other people were having ideas similar to mine. For some reason it feels wonderfully validating when your ideas mirror those of the collective consciousness.

It's interesting how many inventions are disputed because people tend to independently come up with the same idea at the same time. I suppose this happens when the technological and cultural state of the world becomes ripe for a particular idea. It is nice to think of this situation as the culture in general coming up with the idea rather than any particular person.

I think the previous paragraph gives a hint to why I take a weaker view of intellectual property than many people (that is to say, ideas seem less ownable to me). Some things are very clearly ownable. If someone walks out into the middle of nowhere, plants some apple seeds, waters the tree for a few years, then plucks an apple from it, everyone would agree that they, and no one else, own that apple. But the creation of intellectual "property" does not really occur like this. Ideas do not develop in isolation. The situation with cultural and technological developments is much more akin to one person planting some apple seeds, hundreds of others watering the tree, and another person picking the apple.

God, this must be the most rambling blog entry ever. And that's saying a lot.