Most people in this world are regulated by their immediate needs and the stimuli that they receive from the media around them. They go to work to make enough money to pay for food, shelter, and sex - living examples of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

And media is so pervasive that we rely on it unconsciously to provide us with information on what to do and when to do it - unless we make a move to stop following orders...

... And what happens is that we tend to live extraordinarily in the present except for when we need to plan to make a major purchase of some kind like a house or a car...

And then there are those people who plan.

People who plan for the future, the scientists, engineers, investors ... these people are the ones that are shaping the future of the planet, and who owns what and who will pay.

Here is the story about a company that is building for the future - and building around the central concept of Intellectual Property:

Yesterday I bumped into a guy who I know slightly who has recently started working for a company called Intellectual Ventures, and he was explaining to me the business model that they have and who works there etc.

IntVen was started with a capital investment of around $5Billion apparently by Nathan Myhrvold, who was one of the early founding employees of Microsoft and who was also Chief Strategist. I imagine he made a few bucks while he was there, too, hence the starting capital.

Intven is an "inventions company". In essence it is a repository of patents - or a patent pool.

Now the way that patent pools normally work is that they are formed by consortia of big companies that have wide coverage of patents over important areas of commercial activity. They have sufficient footprint over an area that they can go to non-members of the patent pool who act in the space and essentially say to them, "Look you are manufacturing x and there is a probability that to do that you are stepping on one of our pool members' patents so you can either pay us a royalty based on the probability, or else we can have an independant third party reverse engineer your product and provide us with the advice as to whether you do infringe, in which case, based on the fact that we have advised that you are infringing, and the fact that you didn't respond, you will now have to pay triple damages if this goes to court and we win".

That may be overly simplistic but in essence I believe it is the way it works from the conversations that I have had in the past with people who sit on the board of one such pool.

Intven is the same but different. Intven identifies areas that they think could be important in the future and approach scientists and engineers and inventors and ask them if they would like to solve the problem. They pay the inventor for the solution, have the patent written up and filed and sit back and wait. They are a really early stage patent factory. And with the financial muscle of several billions in the bank and inventors like Bill Gates supplying some of the inventions, you would have to believe that not only are they going to be an important business, but that their long term strategic plan must be to own the key intellectual property in every available space that exists.

Imagine a world where one company owns the IP in everything important.

That is what I deduced from the meeting that I had is the vision....

Amazing and scary.