Albert Wenger

Instead, it's this place where we can have all these other innovations come to us.

And I just think, similarly, Twitter and Facebook turned out to be enormous platforms for innovation.

A lot of people have their identity established there in one form or another.

A lot of the graphs are very powerful.

There's a huge amount of knowledge that already resides there about a variety of topics.

So I think these could be very powerful engines on top of which to build.

But I think, and they're not going to go away, just like existing telco companies still have massive businesses.

So I think there are historic models.

I mean, all historic analogies have some flaws, but they can at least inform how we think about these things.

Well, so just to maybe bring everybody along who's listening, the big justification provided for the copyright system and the patent system generally is that it needs to be there to foster content creation and innovation.

And I make the point that we have many other models for incentivizing that.

And the area that I always like to point people to is math, because you can't patent math.

Math researchers generally are not well paid unless they switch over and go work on the finance side.

But math has two things going for it.

It has a very good reputation system, and it has a price system where there's some key prices.

And the combination of the two, reputation plus prices, plus lots of people having an intrinsic motivation to want to work on math because it's very cool.

They find it cool.

That combination of those three factors, intrinsic motivation plus reputation plus price, is proving extraordinarily powerful.

And the amount of progress that's been made in math is mind-blowing.

And I think we can use that same system in many other areas.