A friend of mine, illustrator by trade, was asked by a company to sign a permanent lease for them to use one of his drawings as their logo. In exchange for a small amount of money. He was happy to do so until he found a clause in the contract saying that if the originality of the drawing was challenged in court, he would have to accept all responsibility.

No worries, right? He knows he drew the logo.
Except he doesn´t know how to prove that he did, should it be challenged on court.

Now, he´s an over imaginative guy, what are the odds?, really? But that´s the way he is. And when it dawned on him that he is always liable for his illustrations, whether he signs a contract or not, that really hit his peaceful nights. What if someone says he stole the idea for an illustration from them?

Well, I think he shouldn´t have to answer such an accusation. Ideas should be free to steal, copy or be inspired from.
Not one of us when we come up with a creative idea comes up with something uniquely original. We sample, we copy, we take inspiration from what others have done and add our own twist to it.

Such is the creative process. It´s not stealing.

Even the latest research tends to not be original. As Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School has showed, almost all significant new technologies are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working independently of each other.  (By the way, I pinched this piece of info from the blog TechDirt by Mike Masnick).
It tends to be a coincidence who registers the idea first, in a system that also permits inventors to delay others working in the same field.

The argument in favour of copyright and patents are of course that nobody will have an incentive to innovate if ownership of an idea is not guaranteed by law. Without it artists would not survive. Worse than that; music, film and literature would not survive.

So how come this is not true for the fashion industry?
They´re making billions and billions with no copyright, no protection against people “stealing” their design and reproducing it. Fashion designers don´t seem to need ownership to create and innovate.

How come the perfume industry can survive without copyrights? And the fast-growing “cooking-shows-in TV and books”-industry? Recipes are not protected by copyright.
And what about the extremely creative and even faster growing tattoo-business (worth 2-3 bn US dollars)?
They all “steal”, sample, copy and rework what their colleagues are doing and no one seems to be the poorer for it. Or any less creative.

The Internet and new technology – such as 3D-printers! – has already made it near impossible to keep ideas and their execution under wraps.
Some people go along with this development. Young scientists are throwing out centuries of tradition of protecting scientific ideas and opening up their data bases on-line as well as their thinking processes in exchange for input, criticism, new ideas.
Ah, but who gets acclaimed for coming up with the right answer in the end, earning a good career boost on the ticket?
The young scientists don´t seem to worry, seeing that clever people tend to be noticed and find their way forward even in this new, strange world.

Professor Jörgen Örström Möller at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies argues[1] that these young scientists are part of a new development – the world is moving into a new era with the economy based less on material resources (becoming more scant day by day) and more on knowledge.
Based on ideas.

This is where we should be directing our efforts, not on going in the opposite direction.
I´m even tempted to think it is too bad Italy and Spain didn´t win their attack in the European Court on the newly created European Patent.
Their arguments were absolute rubbish[2] but it would have put another hamper in the EU efforts going on for 40 years now, to find stricter ways to protect European ideas.
What Europe needs it not more of protecting ideas, it is more of sharing ideas.

A clever trick – used often – when a politician is worried about his party´s ranking in the polls or maybe wants direct attention to something else than the sorry state of affairs in the country he is running, is to point finger at immigrants.
It usually pays off really well.

Italian electoral candidate Silvio Berlusconi asked his fellow countrymen to vote for him so as to “stop leftwing parties opening the country´s borders wide to immigration”. This was the very same Berlusconi that during his three stints as prime minister of Italy pushed his country to the brink of economic disaster.
However, on the strength of his electoral arguments (one presumes…) he once again managed to win a strong hold in the Italian Parliament.
The actual fact that immigrants are leaving recession-ridden Italy in droves did not come into the matter.
Facts usually don´t count for much when immigrants are the subject of discussion.

The Danish public debate every now and then works itself into a frenzy over some immigrant related matter. Recently it was the fact that 45 young boys – born to Muslim parents – allegedly has been fighting in Syria alongside the rebels.
Yes, Denmark supports the Syrian rebels over the regime.
Yes, some 25 000 Danish boys have fought abroad since 1992 or as the US central command puts it: “…compared to the size of the Danish population (5.5 million), Denmark is among the leading countries in the world when it comes to participation in international operations.”
But facts don´t count for much when faced with the threat of 45 Muslim boys potentially turning back to Denmark, now trained in how to shoot.

Politicians from most political parties swiftly promised that if the boys survive and return to Denmark, they will be under constant surveillance by the Danish intelligence services. Xenophobic Danish Folkeparti that has lost ground in the polls lately tried to outdo them all with a promise to deport the boys straight away.

The Dutch enjoy a good blame-the-immigrants-game as well. To go with any article about immigrants – meaning any suspicious-looking-therefore-possibly-Muslim boy – the Dutch press have found the perfect illustration. Article after article on the subject of immigration is accompanied by a photo showing such boys proving their shameful ways by covering their face.
Only this picture, pulled out of the archives, was actually taken when 150 Moroccan youngsters visited the Dutch concentration camp in Westerbork, covering their faces in shock as they listened to a camp survivor telling of his experience.

British Prime Minister David Cameron tried the same trick recently, desperate to have the country talking about something else than how badly the economy is faring and how little the government seems to be able to do about it. He too, came up with the idea to blame immigrants, hoping no doubt to win some votes off  the xenophobic UK independence Party.
(Number of British expats in the world: approximately 5 Million.)

The trick worked less well for Mr Cameron. When he announced that he would stand up for his country and put a stop to Eastern European immigrants filling up hospital wards without paying, he was contradicted by none other than his own Health minister.
The fact, lost in the heat of the moment, is that NHS can always claim the money back from other EU governments.

It didn´t work too well for the Conservative party running the Swedish government coalition either.  The Swedish public debate generally tend to react badly to politicians pointing fingers at immigrants but lately the Swedish xenophobic party has been climbing in opinion polls whereas the Conservative party seems to be losing out. Maybe blame-immigrants has become a vote-winner in Sweden too?

The youngest Conservative in government, also immigration minister, Tobias Billstrom was sent out to test the xenophobic waters, to see if any voters could be pulled in.
“It´s not blond and blue eyed people hiding illegal immigrants in this country”, Mr Billstrom stated.
The remark may not count as blatantly racist in some European countries but in Sweden it does. The reaction came swiftly and was harsh, the critics were vociferous and influential.

The Conservative Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt held back a couple of days but in the end had to come out and order the immigration minister to apologize, giving him a stern warning about making remarks of the kind and telling him that “he (Mr Billstrom) must stick to the party line of humane immigration policies if he wants to stay in office”.

Oh, well. It´s usually a really clever trick but it doesn´t always work.
Luckily.