All work and no pay

Actually I'm feeling quite relaxed at the moment. Since the money ran out to pay me at the end of April, I don't have to work so hard. I can catch up with some of the other things that have been falling behind a bit recently.

Of course this not working so hard thing hasn't worked out so well. I realised this after ten and a half hours in the office today. But I had promised to do various things for people and it all felt quite productive really.

And I do have a nice little rewarding and quite flexible part time job for 10 hours a week that will keep the bailiffs away for a while.

In a way this is my response to the boiling water principle, trying to take myself off the burn a bit and be productive in non-monetary ways, and not worrying too much about growth. Time to be more flexible about my options and my thinking and to ready myself for the next wave of activity.

I'm also wondering at the moment about this whole copyright and intellectual property thing. Most people today seem to think that if they write something or invent something or have a new idea, then they must protect it. There's a vague hope that they may be able to make money out of it and thus make their daily life easier. This is a terrible restriction on innovation and shared good practice though, and terrible in so many other ways as well. I haven't read all this chapter, and I can't find any better online resources tonight, but here is a good start:

There is a strong case for opposing intellectual property. Among other things, it often retards innovation and exploits Third World peoples. Most of the usual arguments for intellectual property do not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas provides no justification for ownership of ideas. The alternative to intellectual property is that intellectual products not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and fostering of a more cooperative society.

Against Intellectual Property
Brian Martin

Why is it so difficult to find a range of high quality free policies or training materials today? Why is it that so much advice that is given, or services that are sold to us, are so wrong or inadequate. If there was an open economy of knowledge, would it be so easy for people to pull a fast one on us?

The FLOSS community seem to be developing some really good responses. Many people are managing today to get paid to produce high quality free software, in collaboration with an international community of like-minded people.

Can the advocacy community similarly benefit from these sorts of approaches? What resources do we have amongst us that are currently being 'protected' by concerns about intellectual property that we could use to strengthen ourselves and further develop quality services?