Beware of the Train

Rob Colvile, over at whyoftheworld, has responded to my recent post about IP law. It's a good column: go read it. I appear to have been comprehensively misunderstood (by Rob's commenters, though not by Rob himself), but hey, such is life on the Internet.

The only thing that makes me less than completely reassured by Rob's explanation is that, with software, we're getting damn close to selling pure thoughtstuff (and let's not forget the dizzying tower of abstractions that is modern finance). How much further up the "value chain" is there to go? Will someone eventually invent a way of selling mathematical theorems? The day they do is the day I (and most of the world's mathematicians, I suspect) hand in my chalk and open a bar. The Straightedge and Compasses, perhaps. With blackboards on the tables, and packets of chalk behind the bar.