Jim Balsillie
speaker
218 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jim Balsillie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Well, the US understood that if it was to be strong and prosperous, rich, powerful, and secure, it had to corral this knowledge. So the world moved from open science, open knowledge to closed science and monopolized knowledge that you had to get a rent. You had to pay a rent for the permission to use
somebody else's intellectual property and that went to software technology it went to pharmaceuticals it went to manufacturing technology it went to uh creative industries and right that went to all the value ads that are on top of basic resources yeah intangibles are now 90 of the value of the s p 500. that's where all the money's been and so define intangibles again for everybody
Well, intangible asset is an asset... When you have a physical asset, like this jacket is a physical asset. I own it. That's called a positive right. But the design... And only one person can wear it at a time. That's called rivalrous. Right, so it's finite in supply. It's finite. But the design of this jacket is not finite. It's non-rivalrous. A million people can have that design. And...
where that's not designed at the same time. And the person who owns that design has a negative right that says, I have the legal right to stop you from using that design. So they own a fence. They own a fence. And the economy shifted from producing, getting rich from producing jackets alone to extracting a rent from, for the design of that jacket.
Oh, Napster. Napster.
Yeah, and when you physically own something, it's kind of not contested most of the time. It's unambiguous. But ownership of an idea evolves literally hundreds of times a day, different standards. And so Napster is an idea where there was very intense copyright issues that shut down Napster. But there was a dozen very substantial copyright cases for Google.
Were you allowed to bring a snippet forward? And if you remember, all the owners of this content were litigating from New York City to say stop Google, and Google ran the cards. And so a bunch of judicial decisions framed the opening for Google to do search.
Yeah, and that's a principle of fair use. Because when you index something and you show it forward to somebody and then give a link to that content... Is that taking away their revenue? And they argued no in the original search, but now in AI, do the weights embody expressive content that fundamentally takes away the revenue of the owner and that's- Or even replaces the owner.
Well, I mean, replaces and takes away the revenue are two sides of the same coin. And then at that point, the courts have to weigh in because intellectual property is not a natural right. It's a social bargain. whereas your physical possession is pretty much kind of a natural, right? My home is my home. It's more self-evident. It's self-evident, but these are evolving bargains for social good.
There's some good questions there. I mean, one is that Milton Friedman talks a lot about free markets, but that predates the knowledge-based economy and then the data-driven economy.
Well, but the issue is the nature of these laws is to introduce friction to grant monopolies. So free trade agreements in a production economy are to spread competition, right? But then these agreements went to stronger and stronger enforcement of intellectual property rights to spread monopolies.
And the market and the government designs and changes the definition of ownership all the time for... And the courts as well. With the courts interpreting that to... advanced state interest, so it becomes an instrument of geostrategic projection, because if you control the valuable assets, you're more secure and you're more rich.
And so it was a two-legged race, spreading liberalization of markets, capital, and labor. Yeah, which we did reasonably well at. And then enclosing and monopolizing knowledge.
But other countries did very, very well.
No, no, we signed the same agreements as everybody else. But as I said to you, I think the original sin was,
was that 1994, December 1994, Orange Book by Industry Canada that talks about building a more innovative economy, that it's about better jobs and more efficiency, which are production economy constructs, and never references the two seismic treaties that the country signed six months earlier.
Well, Canada in the last 10 years has been last place in GDP per capita of the top 50 developed countries in the world.
Well, GDP per capita performance. Performance. You can call it the worst decrease. Yeah. We're last place in performance. Of 50 developed countries.
Of the 50. Yes. Over the last 10 years. And in the last 40 years, we're last place in the OECD in productivity, in growing that. And then we're forecast to be last place in the next 40 years. So we've pretty well cemented. So we've got 100 years. We're cemented last place.
It's a proxy for paycheck per worker.
Showing 21–40 of 218 · page 2 of 11
← Previous
Next →