The Authors Speak
Note: Before continuing with a series of interviews included in the original "Great American Idea Book" here is an excerpt from the authors, Bob Coleman & Deborah Neville, addressing the writers' point of view.
We've written this from our hearts as much as our heads: We believe that creativity, like freedom, lies at the core of the American experience and the American character. We also believe in free enterprise and the Constitutionally guaranteed right of people to profit from their creative endeavors.
Yet we'd be unfair if we did not acknowledge an equally honorable American tradition. It dates from Ben Franklin, (who refused to patent anything he invented, including the famous Franklin stove, America's first commercially successful invention), and Thomas Jefferson, whose creativity in everything from architecture and inventing, to literature and political philosophy probably ranks him as our country's only universal genius. Jefferson and Franklin held ideas to be the common property of all humankind--and felt their debt to those who came before them more than canceled their right to profit from what they themselves created.
That tradition continues today, in people like Berkeley professor Lofti Zadeh, who never made or sought a penny from the invention of "fuzzy logic," a mathematical innovation that led to several thousand industrial patents (mostly taken out by Japanese companies) in its first few years. It lives in Richard Stallman, considered by many to be the finest computer programmer alive, who not only gives away his own software but has fought for years to end the patenting and/or copyrighting of any software. Except for winning a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, he has yet to profit from programs in use by companies and research institutions worldwide.
We're certainly not urging you to donate your inventions whole cloth to the world at large, and obviously we'd never argue in favor of abolishing intellectual property rights. What you create is and should be yours alone, to dispose of as you see fit.
Yet we'd urge you to consider the views of Jefferson, Franklin, and others, at least to the degree of trying to pass along some of what you've gained, so as to help stimulate the community of ideas from which our common success stems.
What you do is up to you. Researching this, we've met inventors who donated time to museums, film producers and directors who teach college courses and endow university fellowships, immensely wealthy business pioneers who underwrite entire university complexes or reate their own philanthropies.
Herman Melville described our human condition as "a mutual, joint-stock world in all meridians, shipmate." We sail, or sink, together.
Maybe that's the greatest American idea of them all.
Excerpted from
The Great American Idea Book: How to Make Money from Your Ideas for Movies, Music, Books, Inventions, Businesses and Almost Anything Else!
Authors: Bob Coleman & Deborah Neville
Publisher: WW Norton
Copyright: 1993; 1995
All Rights Reserved
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