Today is (according to the mail in my inbox) World Intellectual Property Day. Innovators Network is asking us all to write our elected officials and ask them to provide strong support for intellectual property and to ask our trading partners to do the same.

I have been in several discussions over the years about how to protect intellectual property. There is a continuum of opinion on how much our code needs to be protected. At one end you have the open source projects that give the code away and at the other end you have the proprietary applications that use activation or a dongle to protect the application and ensure that only licensed users are accessing it. I don’t know that any one way is right or wrong but it is more of a business decision. In college I was working for a professor who had computer based training available and he made the decision to require a dongle to use it. The dongle attached to the parallel port and in a few cases caused problems with printers (the pass through didn’t work right or something). I know he generated some ill will and I talked to some irate customers but in his case he thought it was worth the hassle. Whatever your views on the issue I think most of us agree that we should be compensated for our efforts. In some cases that is money in others it is peer recognition but we should be the ones who choose what we expect to get from our efforts. Because of that I think we should all be concerned when our work is taken without our permission.

There is a form at https://secure3.convio.net/act/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=121&AddInterest=1027&JServSessionIdr004=11jql40as2.app331b if you want to fill out a form to send a message to your elected representatives asking them to support intellectual property.