Uploaded July 2014 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

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TEDtalk: npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/321797073/what-is-original?showDate=2014-06-27

"While giving away a patent might seem totally radical today, it turns out that some of the greatest inventions in history happened because people shared their ideas and they let others build on them. People like Ben Franklin. "Ben Franklin never patented anything he did, and he always kind of, released any information about what he'd come up with as widely as possible. He had a great explanation for this, which is he said he'd sent his ideas out into the world so they would 'attract the attentions of the ingenious'".

Ideas and innovation thrive in environments where ideas are free to flow from mind to mind and to be reused and repurposed and remixed in interesting and surprising ways. And alot of the technology we're dependent on has come out of that kind of collaborative network."