Idea: Save the Information in Nonprofits, Save the World.

MIT–

A nonprofit called Common Crawl is now using its own Web crawler and making a giant copy of the Web that it makes accessible to anyone. The organization offers up over five billion Web pages, available for free so that researchers and entrepreneurs can try things otherwise possible only for those with access to resources on the scale of Google’s.

This is the absolute right approach. You can’t trust these behemoth corporations to give us a level playing field. You have to make it. And we’re at a point where it needs to be done in an intentional and aggressive way. Otherwise we stand to lose control of the decentralized global platform that underpins life today.

Common Crawl is a good start. The legal process for this is something that needs to be formalized, streamlined, and copy/pasted across all domain areas.

Do this for drones, 3d printing, food systems, everything where patent-garbage can get in the way of innovation. Capture as much intellectual property as you can, shovel it into a nonprofit,  and repeat. Set the rules. Wield their systems against them.

Note: For anyone unfortunate enough to go to law school in recent times, this is a BIG opportunity.

-Shlok
Sign up for my newsletter.