What’s an idea worth? How prominent thinkers have understood intellectual property
Should owning an idea be treated the same way as owning a physical object, or are these two forms of property rights ultimately incomparable? How should societies balance incentivising new ideas with the desire to make them freely available for the greater good? This animated TED-Ed short explores the contrasting ways philosophers including John Locke, David Hume and Elizabeth Anderson have viewed intellectual property rights over the centuries. Revisited in the age of digitisation, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid the rise of machine learning, these long-standing debates about the ethics of idea ownership take on fascinating new contours.
Video by TED-Ed
Director: Patrick Smith
Producer: Sazia Afrin
Writers: Michael Vazquez, Will Kanwischer
videoEthics
A deathbed scenario raises the question: how much power should a promise hold?
5 minutes
videoKnowledge
A Kichwa activist on ayahuasca’s rise – and what it really means to her people
15 minutes
videoNature and landscape
Scenes from Aboriginal Australian pottery chart the turn of the seasons
7 minutes
videoKnowledge
Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy
10 minutes
videoChildhood and adolescence
‘Do worms cry?’ – and other questions collected from the mind of a curious child
4 minutes
videoHistory of science
Meet the Quaker pacifist who shattered British science’s highest glass ceilings
14 minutes
videoEthics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
videoAnimals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes
videoKnowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes