mordant wit

The difference between ideas and things is obvious as soon as someone hits you over the head with an idea - so obvious that until recently it was entirely clear to the law.

Things could have owners and ideas could not. Yet this simple distinction is being changed all around us. Ideas are increasingly treated as property - as things that have owners who may decide who gets to use them and on what terms.

Ideas such as one-click shopping, getting customer reviews on a website or even putting classified ads on the internet are now patented, which is to say that somebody owns them - Amazon.com the first two, Google, the classified ad patent - and anybody else who wants to make use of them must pay a rent to the owner. Last week, Amazon was also granted a patent that covers getting shoppers to review the things they have bought on its website. BT has tried to patent the hyperlink, Microsoft is trying to patent XML, a way of writing computer files that is fundamental to the operation of modern business. The fight over the human genome and its patenting - and over the patenting of drugs - is another, and perhaps more familiar front in the war. Ideas are codified as intellectual property and regarded as among the most important assets a company can own. As where things are made becomes less important in the formerly industrialised nations of the west, the real value comes in the licence to allow others to make them.

Even facts about the world can, in some cases, become the property of commercial companies. It was the promise of gaining patents on the human genome that lured investors into the private consortium that attempted to sequence it in competition with the public effort. Laboratory animals have already been patented, starting with the OncoMouse, an animal whose genome has been manipulated to ensure that it develops cancer.