Creative Workers

Here we consider workers as divided into four categories according to whether they create IPR and how they exploit IPR. The purpose here is to probe the development of a market like economy in intellectual property in which intellectual property is created by individuals and traded openly at all levels of granularity.

No IPR Creation
- Most workers today are not engaged in creating intellectual property.
  This doesn't mean that they are not creative. They might be producing physical artefacts or performing services.
Employees
- Creating IPR for their employer
  In the future we suggest that this category will be occupied by relatively low value IPR creation or by the creation of IPR which is not freely tradeable by virtue of being locked into pre-existing IPR (e.g. upgrades to an existing software product).
Freelance workers.
- Creating IPR and selling it on the market.
  Maybe for cash, maybe for royalties.
Independents
- Create IPR and accumulate intellectual property, deriving revenue by means other than disposal.
  This category is likely to be diverse, and contains both the most and the least valuable kinds of IPR. In the former category we might rank, for example, books such as "Jurassic Park" which form the basis for major films and associated commercialisation programmes. In the latter category there will be the huge volumes of IPR on the "web as vanity publishing" which has a zero market valuation. (of which this is an example)

created 97/9/27 modified 97/9/27