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Almost overnight, our technology revolution is shaking up entire industries and remaking society. Don\u2019t get caught up in the small stuff, though: Tech really is changing how we think about our ideas.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve used ideas to sculpt the globe since the Industrial Revolution, thanks largely to the way we handle intellectual property. When machines, and machines to make identical machines, mass-produced reliably identical goods, it was because people understood the same set of instructions.<\/p>\n
Mass-produced books, music and movies were possible, too. Like machine-making instructions, these items were made reliable and protected with laws of copyright, patent and trademark.<\/p>\n
Now, according to people involved in the business of protecting ideas, all of that is set to change.<\/p>\n
Software, lashing together thousands of computer servers into fast and flexible cloud-computing systems, is the reason. Clouds, wirelessly connected to more software in just about everything, make it possible to shift, remix and borrow from once separate industrial categories.<\/p>\n
\u201cProducts are taking on a lot more functionality, like cars that have touch screens, streaming video, and Wi-Fi antennas,\u201d said Russell E. Levine, a Chicago-based partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis who specializes in patent infringement and licensing. \u201cCarmakers are used to thinking about the I.P. around brakes and exhaust systems. Now they need to think about who owns what technology in all kinds of products.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Levine works with a lot of smartphone companies. In that business, it\u2019s not just that an app-rich, cloud-connected phone may be at one moment a chessboard, then an Internet browser. Smartphones are an example of connected products that are intended to sell by the hundred million, standardized across a hundred countries. The cross-licensing of ideas across that many borders is almost as complicated as the global cloud itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are things we never thought about, as industries get connected to each other,\u201d said Pamela Demain, president of the Licensing Executives Society, an intellectual property trade group. \u201cThere is a huge amount of complexity in software-driven converged devices, with I.P. at the center of the development. You add in wireless and globalization, that just adds more complexity.\u201d<\/p>\n
So far, this sounds like full employment for the lawyers, and an intensification of business as usual. Looking at the long-term direction of tech, however, it could spell the opposite.<\/p>\n
There are over one million servers in each of the big clouds of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, executives at those companies say. For new entrants, one limit is that capital spending costs more than $1 billion a year. Another is engineering know-how; how the future works will be in just a couple of thousand heads, at most.<\/p>\n
Everything, be it software and networking or power, is different when so many computers are spread across the globe. The pace of innovation is so quick, and the number of players so small, that in some cases, the players elect not to patent inventions, wary of what they\u2019d disclose about themselves in the application.<\/p>\n
A number of other big players are still trying to come at the proprietary hold of these giants, and to do it, they\u2019re using open-source software, a license-free method of creating a product, fast, by distributing the work as widely as possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cOpen source isn\u2019t just a way to give back to the community. It\u2019s a way to blow up the other guy,\u201d said Bill Hilf, who oversees Hewlett-Packard\u2019s work on OpenStack, a kind of open-source, cloud-computing software.<\/p>\n
Hoping to build a product better than Amazon\u2019s cloud, HP has over 400 paid engineers working full time to help a community of thousands create this free software. It has also donated enormous amounts of valuable software, like networking and automation tools. It even indemnifies its OpenStack customers against patent lawsuits.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat gives our lawyers ulcers,\u201d Mr. Hilf said. \u201cThey have to protect a product that is being changed all the time by people who don\u2019t work for HP.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, the corporate donations to cloud-based open source seem unstoppable. Mr. Hilf noted that Linux, an open-source operating system \u201ctook 15.8 years to get 180 companies contributing. OpenStack took 1.6 years to get 160 companies. It\u2019s insane.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last month, Facebook, Google, Walmart\u2019s online operation and others announced a consortium with a goal of enabling new versions of software to be released multiple times a day. They used to come out every few years.<\/p>\n
Hoping to move even faster against his competitors, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook\u2019s chief executive, three years ago took the unusual strategy of open-sourcing not software, but computer hardware. In June, this produced a networking switch, or a gear that helps direct data traffic over large computer networks.<\/p>\n
Hardware and software of all kinds may further change with 3-D printing. Designs there can be widely shared and modified in a computer, to an extent that originals are hard to recognize, let alone protect.<\/p>\n