[tathougies]

Following this line of reasoning, one must be worried about who one ought to pay when one makes a wheel out of dirt. I mean that honestly. As a society, we agree the buck ends somewhere for the most part. That which is freely available or observable knowledge typically doesn't mandate compensative.

Public DARPA knowledge is presumably available to every American citizen (or at least it ought to be, since they presumable paid for it). So is employee behavior.

In general, I'm not sure you should be paid for simply having knowledge. You must apply it. Patents represent a recapture of the process for producing knowledge (however poorly one may argue they do it), but those come with an expiration date too.

That is to say, all knowledge eventually loses its price, and some never had any to begin with.

[rmrfstar]

I think you hit the nail on the head.

DARPA and NSF could very easily attach some IP rights to every project that they fund, but they don't. Maybe they should?

Congress could easily pass a law giving workers an ownership interest in recordings of their work "performance". You can't tape a concert and sell the recording without the musician's permission. Why can you do that with other tasks?

As we speak, there are companies tracking the eye movements of radiologists reviewing charts. I for one think the radiologists should get some ownership stake in the resulting architecture.