Bono, the lead singer of U2 (and the leading anti-poverty sunglasses model), has little apparent connection with biomedical patents.  However, featured prominently on the Times Op-Ed page last week was his version of the 10 ideas most likely to “change our world” over the next decade.  Number 2?  Enforcing intellectual property rights. Many people probably wonder why that seemingly simple priority is the slightest bit controversial (I used to be one of them).  This confusion is rooted in the pervasive, often unconscious, and wholesale embrace of the role of the state in enforcing claims to ideas and knowledge.  Indifference toward our government-imposed model of intellectual property has enormous implications for the status of knowledge, the relations between government and industry, and the future of a technological society.

Photo: David Shankbone

Maybe I’m taking Bono a bit too seriously.  (In all honesty, I haven’t really thought of him much since my days as a 14-year-old Achtung Baby fan).  In spite of his many good intentions, his status as an official, though occasional, Times Op-ed writer has seemed like an embarrassing attempt at hipness by the paper.  At least the Times hasn’t run an entire issue dedicated to Bono’s causes, as the UK’s Independent did in 2006.  From any reasonable perspective, the argument he makes about enforcing intellectual property rights is cringe-worthy, and reveals a surprising lack of political sophistication from someone who regularly meets with world leaders.  Claiming, as he does, that we should model a music-sharing crackdown on China’s internet censorship techniques, by encouraging the government to “track content” as it attempts to do with child pornography, is downright scary.

Scholars of law and society have said it before, much more eloquently, but our collective attitude toward the way our government administers knowledge and ideas is simple: indifference.  This contrasts starkly with many other issues that get people riled up: healthcare legislation, global warming, red-light cameras, terrorist investigations, vaccinations.  Even (or especially) among the tea-party masses supposedly surging up in a populist roar, it is clear that a large portion of our society cares about way the state treats them, and has some notion of their ideal government.  If the issue is guns or estate taxes, different groups are readily massed to debate the benefits and evils of government regulation.

Except among an echo chamber of legal and tech nerds, however, intellectual property is one gigantic role that government has carved out for itself that no one else really seems to notice, or care about.  As Bono points out, technology has brought huge changes to the ways that knowledge and technology is created and disseminated.  He fails to point out the equally gigantic power the government has taken, with surprisingly little public outcry, to protect those who would be considered “special interests” in any other political battle: copyright and patent holders.

There are several factors that have led to this situation, but the blame lies with the public itself.  There has been excellent PR on the part of those that benefit from lengthy copyrights and patent tangles–content owners, attorneys and other powerful institutions.  And, as imperfect and irrational beings we, ourselves, are confounded by this thing called intellectual property.  In the context of copyrights, James Boyle terms it “cultural agoraphobia”: a natural human tendency “to undervalue the importance, viability, and productive power of open systems, open networks and nonproprietary production.”  (For more, read his excellent book, The Public Domain).  He and others have also pointed how difficult for us to determine ownership, if any, of knowledge and content that flow as easily as bits, since we still mostly among physical property.

This is not a diatribe against the government’s role in maintaining a system of intellectual property rights.   However, I’ll give my own prediction for the next decade’s “big idea”: unless the public asks much more serious questions about how intellectual property rights are created and enforced, those who profit from them will see to it that our government expands to their aid, at an incalculable cost to all of us.