Customer Reviews

Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity

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Why does our property rights system grant huge sums of money to people who did nothing to create the knowledge that is the source of their wealth? Should so-called "private" corporations be allowed to make hundreds of millions of dollars off Federal and State court cases? Should workers be thrown in jail for filing patents in ideas that the companies they've worked at have ignored as unworthy of consideration for patenting?

These kinds of issues strain our sense of just what property is and as Michael Perelman shows in his clearly written text full of actual yet surreal economic events, the US, indeed the global community of nations, is in dire need of a serious rethinking of property rights in knowledge information and natural resources if we are to avoid the litigatory nuthouse.

Professor Perelman also notes that without a cultural rethink inequalities of income, wealth and power will, in all probability, get even worse, with tragic repercussions for democracy, liberty and the production of future knowledge as well.

By investigating scores and scores of episodes from economic history, both recent and remote, Professor Perelman also shows that was has traditionally been called a free market is in fact a legal oxymoron, as well as inconsistent with what we now know from economic and political theory. As such his book holds important lessons regarding what kinds of questions we need to be asking in all seriousness regarding how our modes of organizing work and citizenship may actually stifle freedom and creativity in producing and distributing knowledge and information.

In an era when genomes, ecosystems and algorithms are being commodified and appropriated at such a frenzied pace, we would do well to ask as many questions as possible about who shall benefit and who will be burdened. All in all, a must read.

Street thieves are incarcerated and corporate thieves are rewarded in our society. I have read Professor Perelman's book "Steal This Idea" twice and feel I am just coming to grips with the silent government running our country. Corporate America is the enemy of democracy through its donations to elected officials, retainers to influential Washington law firms, and its control of our media.

Dwight D. Eisenhower stated, "Every step we take toward making the State the caretaker of our lives, by that much we move toward making the State our master." Corporations have merged to purge Americans of their wealth, creativity, and civil rights. Professor Perelman is to be commended for his exposition "How Intellectual Property Rights Enrich the Few While Undermining Liberty, Science, and Society." Read this book and you will learn how your civil rights and your freedom are slipping away rapidly.

I also bought five books for friends, as I didn't want them to be walking around in a fog not knowing what we have become as a nation. Karl Marx wrote, "In the valley of the blind with one eye you can be king." We are in the valley. Read the book, wake up, and be your own king.

I learned quite a bit from reading this book. I did not know that the business of intellectual property was so large and preventing so many people from getting the technology which would improve their lives. I had no idea that many people receiving the financial benefits from owning patents didn't actually develop the ideas, but simply were the first to get to the patent office and file the paperwork.

I have stolen the ideas he offered up in this book and shared them with many other people. I found myself this weekend making several referrals to the book. I wanted to be sure of the author's name and so here I am looking on Amazon and thinking I should thank him for the ideas I have stolen from him. I am a member of Technocracyinc.org and his ideas fit together well with that developed body of knowledge. Technocracy has always promoted the stealing of its ideas too.

Perelman catalogs a litany of injustices (perceived and real) associated with intellectual property. The injustices themselves are fairly interesting, but Perelman's analysis is shrill and unashamedly biased - every case builds into his thesis that intellectual property is evil and must be replaced...

But this is the biggest problem with the book - 150 pages of criticism of the system that builds to a crescendo of NOTHING. At the end of the book he reveals that he doesn't have any idea of how the system could be improved or what it could be replaced with; even an implausible or unworkable suggestion would be better than none at all.

In the end I was left disappointed but not altogether unsurprised.

I practice patent law, and believe there needs to be a serious reconsideration of intellectual property rights and economic incentives for research in this country.

Unfortunately, I cannot take this book seriously, and will return it rather than finish reading it. In reading perhaps 30 pages of the book, I noted quite a number of basic errors or mischaracterizations of patent laws and the basic mechanics of obtaining patents.

Perhaps he has some good arguments to make about IP rights. I might even agree with some of them. However, he has either failed to do his legal research properly or he has deliberately mischaracterized patent laws. Either way, his credibility is shot with me.