I happen to be a big fan of the Wright brothers. They are my heroes. They were two rather average Ohio boys who had very little formal education, but with a little imagination and a lot of perseverance, they changed the world.
For those of you who have not studied them, the Wright brothers did not invent powered flight. Other people had invented airfoils, the Wright Brothers just improved on them. Other people invented internal combustion engines, the Wright brothers just borrowed them. What the Wright brothers did was understand that an airplane has to have three axes of control, and they figured out that you had to have ailerons on the main wings to tilt left and right) , a rudder on the upper part of a tail (to point leftand right), and little ailerons on the sideways tail fins (to point up and down). It took them a lot of time, aggravation, experimenting, and living in a miserable shack to figure all this out. But they did it. And every single airplane you see today operates on this system that they invented.
Unfortunately, once they invented this system, all of their extraordinary creative capability was expended on two things: marketing, and protecting their patent. These two exceptional minds, which could (and should) have been inventing other engineering marvels, were completely taken up with these rather mundane tasks . . . .tasks that just about anybody could have done. Marketing people and patent lawyers are a fairly commonplace commodity. Inventors like the Wrights are very rare.
Marketing is part of the game, but I personally view it as a tragic failure of our intellectual property laws that minds like those of the Wright brothers had to spend any amount of time on that aspect of their lives, much less all of it. And that brings me to today’s point.
One of the biggest issues I face as a creator of intellectual property is dealing with getting paid for my work. Copyright laws are woefully obsolete, and are inadequate to face the issues of online world. I have a new book that I think my fans will adore. But I just never seem to have the time to get to it. I spend almost every waking hour dealing with marketing and or copyright protection issues, and those hours are all hours that I don’t spend writing my next book.
I am not alone. Authors more famous than me complain bitterly about their ebooks being pirated and offered online for next to nothing.
Copyright laws exist (at least in theory) to encourage creative people to do more creating. In a world where we are gleefully downloading all kinds of intellectual property for free, there is a collective failure to recognize that if you don’t pay for last year’s crop, this year’s crop will not get planted. It’s very hard to quantify all the stuff that isn’t being created or invented. Yeah, it’s great for aviation generally that so many other manufacturers were able to use the Wrights’ invention witout really paying for it, we got a lot more airplanes, but the Wright brothers, once they solved the problems of controlled flight, were so busy trying to protect their patent that they never solved any other problem. One can only speculate as to what other extraodinary leap(s) we all missed out on.
© Justin Locke
