Can your IP survive in the age of the internet?

LibGen screenshot

At the end of September, major parts of the notorious shadow library LibGen (Library Genesis) were switched off after a US court ordered it to pay $30 million to compensate rightsholders.

The judgement said the digital library, which is full of works that are still under copyright, had committed “wilful infringement” and that the site should be banned from the internet. Harsh words…

LibGen has a large amount of protected material on its servers. Its total size is reportedly 46 terabytes of data which, if you are familiar with the tiny size of a digital book, equates to a lot of books. The site also receives more than 16 million monthly visitors.

LibGen isn’t the only digital library under fire for copyright infringement. In September, major record labels also hit the non-profit Internet Archive with a $621 million lawsuit.

Founded in 1996 by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl, the Archive is the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering over 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and much more.

At least with the Internet Archive, there is a face behind the project. Kahl made $250 million when he sold a different technology company to Amazon 20 years ago. He has since spent his time and money on philanthropic projects like the Internet Archive. Due to his wealth, Kahl has plenty of legal air cover to avoid being targeted by courts. But LibGen is different.

It’s not clear who owns LibGen’s domain names and IP addresses so there is no thin neck to squeeze. Thousands of volunteers worldwide upload files and share torrents every day to protect the shadow library from being taken down. LibGen is effectively indestructible simply because of the way the internet was set up to make things like this as robust as possible.

Said differently, copyright laws have no power on the global internet.

While such sites are hugely valuable for the public and science in general, sites like LibGen and Internet Archive make life very difficult for companies undertaking research and development.

After all, if their precious innovation, which might cost thousands of human hours and millions of dollars, can just be uploaded onto a digital library for the world to see – what’s the point?

Sure, one could retort that all knowledge should be free and that copyright laws are immoral anyway. That’s a reasonable position. But it’s not how the corporate world works. Businesses rely on being guaranteed ownership of the intellectual property they create, at least for some years, and trust that the state will help them protect those ideas from competition.

So, it’s no wonder that companies are supporting courts in targeting shadow libraries. This is entirely within the interests of corporations with business models that depend on copyright.

Yet due to how the internet is set up, any injunction against a shadow library is a bit like punching a puddle of water. No matter how hard you hit, the droplets only jump around for a while before flowing back together as a new puddle – or a dozen smaller puddles.

The internet is not going away. Too much of the world relies on it now, even those corporations. This means valuable IP will continue to leak onto the internet. Companies can support legal action against internet sites, but lawfare is worse than useless – it means companies are spending their precious resources on lawyers rather than on inventing new ideas.

If this problem were easy to solve, it would have been solved already. The truth is that the internet makes it enormously difficult for companies to protect their innovation. And yet, innovation must continue somehow, or we are all finished.

The only real strategy is to connect as many other intangible assets on top of a piece of intellectual property as possible. An idea needs a powerful brand, excellent data insights, a smooth software suite, beautiful design and strong business relationships with key players in related sectors. Innovation is not good enough on its own.

The new rule of the internet is that if you run an innovative company, you should assume your ideas are already compromised the moment someone comes up with them. You should assume someone, somewhere, has uploaded those ideas onto a shadow library like LibGen, SciHub or the Internet Archive.  

Given that this is the new reality of doing business, can your company survive with its ideas in the public? Can it still make money off innovation that anyone can copy?

Most businesses will be nervous about these questions because they don’t have a constellation of intangible assets to protect their ideas.

Instead, their grand strategy is just being first to market. That might work for some, but without a robust brand or decent customer data insights, it’s not a guaranteed strategy at all. Far from it. You need that constellation of other intangible if you are to survive in the age of the internet.

That’s the world we live in now.

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