The pool is finally done and summer is here. Unfortunately, the pool attracts mosquitoes. And my cousin Corbett. The pool is attractively situated in a madrone grove. Madrones are beautiful trees with three distinct seasons. First, they drop berries, billions of berries that cover the ground like snow and then rot and attract fruit flies. Then there's leaf-fall, which actually comes twice a year in California. Finally there's the period when all the bark peels off in ticket-stub-sized pieces that smell like salami.
This was berry season, and cousin Corbett had volunteered to sweep madrone berries off the pool deck, but he was instead pacing furiously up and down the deck, and the broom was nowhere in sight. I was sitting in a deck chair with the portable, working on my column, my few square inches of exposed skin white with sunscreen and Avon Skin-So-Soft.
Here's a tip: The best mosquito repellent in the world is Avon Skin-So-Soft. I know an Avon lady who sells it to lumberjacks and deer hunters in northern Wisconsin, and she told me so.
"Where's the broom?" I asked.
Corbett was fuming. "I don't know. I put it down somewhere. Do you know what they did to me now?"
I didn't much care. "You're walking on the madrone berries."
"They ripped me off again. It's all this task-based computing stuff. Microsoft has its OLE and Apple has its Amber and NeXT has its NeXTstep and Taligent has its Taligent_."
"You're not claiming that you came up with that technology?"
"No, but I did try to trademark the word 'task'."
"Corbett, you can't trademark a common word like that. Listen to me: When you walk on the berries, you grind them into the deck."
"Sure you can. I should have had a killer intellectual property infringement suit, but they ripped me off." He picked up a rock and tossed it pensively into the pool.
"Corbett," I snapped, "any suit over your intellectual property could be settled in small claims court."
Instead of shutting him up, this set him off in a new direction.
"I wonder what the lower limit is on the size of an intellectual property? There are deals where you can buy one square inch of land; could you, say, sell your name?"
I perked up. A MacUser editor had recently published some anagrams of my name in his column. Was there an intellectual property issue there?
"Or individual letters," Corbett went on, pacing faster. "I know Intel wanted to trademark lowercase i, but I see AT&T using it in ads these days. And Zilog wanted to trademark Z_."
"_which everybody knows is the mark of Zorro," I added. Then I recalled a billboard in San Francisco that had puzzled me recently. The company's logo looked so familiar, yet I couldn't place it. It finally hit me that a C in a circle ought to look familiar to a writer. "Can you trademark the copyright symbol?" I asked.
"How about the trademark symbol? Ask the transcendental meditation people. But listen, it just occurred to me that this minimal intellectual property business is a crisis in the making for the entire world economy."
"What the devil are you talking about? And if you have to stamp your foot like that, could you find a spot with fewer berries?"
He pointed an accusatory finger at me. "Are you aware that every stock ever listed on the New York Stock Exchange is given a unique four-letter code? That code is a kind of intellectual property, and it's worth a lot."
"So what?"
"So the number of possible codes is a finite limit on the number of possible stocks. We're talking about a few million codes here, a meaningflimit. And you know that a limit doesn't actually have to be reached to exert an inhibiting effect. The mere existence of a limit can be inhibiting, in this case inhibiting the growth of the economy." He picked up the portable. "Do you have the White House's CompuServe ID?"
I walked over to the pool and stood looking down into the deep end. At least now I knew where he put the broom.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
Copyright © 1993, Dr. Dobb's Journal