As you know, every Sunday for the past 48 Sundays we've selected our Intellectual Property Babe of the Week. The Team 24Ahead Selection Committee was recently finalizing the paperwork for the latest selection - feature-length animator and copyright activist Nina Paley (link) - when suddenly Guillaume burst in, saying, "Zut alors, you must watch this!" We all clustered around his MacBook and watched. "Zut alors, indeed, " I said softly when the video (attached) was over. Normally, I would have continued with the process, despite the fact that her singing is a bit flat but, more importantly, despite the fact that she's appearing in a video featuring a lightweight who sang an anti-Sarah Palin song (link) and who more recently sang a paean to Paul Krugman (link) which was promoted by Ben Smith.

No, the reason why I have decided to instead entitle this award the "Probably Wrong About Intellectual Property Laws Babe of the Week" award is because in case I ever invent a new type of bicycle I don't want it either stolen or copied. A bicycle isn't just a rock or something, it's a bundle of various types of property possibly representing years of work and a great deal of money in research. The logo on the frame represents a valuable trademark and an investment in the process to come up with the design; the design of specific components no doubt involve man-months of research and development and may involve patents; the sales materials for the bike represent other forms of development; the company producing the bike probably spent a large amount of money promoting the product; and so on. And, all of that would be affected if someone copies it. If they just copy one bike that would reduce the market by one item that the company that make the bike initially won't sell; if they make a million copies and sell them in China that prevents the original maker from entering that market. And, all of the foregoing would make it much less likely that bike makers would innovate; who would spend all the time on inventing new products when others could simply take them without paying for them? The bottom line here is that - at least in the case of bicycles - copying is indeed theft.