That’s exactly the point: I believe that you cannot exclusively own the ideas or the fruits of your intellect. You can’t own them because you have no ultimate control over them. And if you have no ultimate control over them you can’t restrict them getting used by somebody else. More precisely: You still have control over your idea as the fruit of your labor and it is under your control exactly what you do with it. But you cannot control someone else’s idea, even if it is exaclty the same. Any information that is open in any way can and probably will also be used openly.

Some examples that illustrate this:

1. Suppose a physicist goes for a walk every evening and observes the sky attentively. As he ponders the fundamental processes of our universe, he experiences an epiphany and begins to better understand one of these processes. He goes home and fiddles around with a mathematical formula that could support this insight. Finally, he finds it and happily publishes it in a scientific magazine. Even if you can now say that you would have to buy this magazine, it will eventually leak out and the whole world can benefit from his findings. Can the discoverer then say that he owns this knowledge because he has put a lot of work into it?
2. Assume that two people are studying at the same university with the same professor. They don’t really know each other, but both are doing research on the same topic based on the same assumptions. They come up with two fundamentally identical results to solve the problem. Who owns this idea now? The one who runs to the patent office first?

I think the core aspect is to realize that work does not necessarily have to be followed by a reward. Just as a tinkerer can spend days working on a device only to discover later that someone else has already solved the same problem, one cannot say that an idea, no matter how innovative or fundamental it may ultimately be, can necessarily be rewarded monetarily. Or in short: work does not necessarily create wages. Is it not rather the decision of the customers whether they entrust their money to whom? Whether they prefer to give it to the original inventor or to a soulless copycat?

I think that in a world that is becoming more and more automated and where machines are slowly taking over the discovery of new formulas and processes, the story behind the products is becoming more and more important.