Discussions of intellectual property laws, and what might be done to loosen them, often hit a snag: what is the individual to do? Too often there are just the personal acts of resistance – the copying and distribution of movies, music, and software, accompanied by bleats of “information should be free”, “culture should be free”, and other such nonsense. All quite selfish and pathetic, and almost always, I’d wager, unaccompanied by any channeling of the pirated savings toward the open source projects, non-corporate artists, and consumer advocacy that would help render such sordid information embezzlement unappealing in the first place.

Congratulations, Sparky, through your expropriation efforts you’ve filled this year’s fad media deployment toy with gigabytes of mind-numbing, mass-produced schlock. You even slapped some of the schlock together and uploaded a digital collage to your favorite video sharing site. Way to fight that power. That’s not rebellion. That’s free advertising, whether the copyright holders recognize it or not. Your HegePod and your computer aren’t the only tools taking up space in your bedroom.

For the intellectual property that matters – the computer code, the genetic code, the medical treatments – the individual needs an option other than “GIMME!”. One alternative is “Sabotage!” Take something like India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library that can be used to block a corporation’s medical patent – then find some way to link it and new patent applications up to a crowdsourcing or distributed computing project. Encourage groups of people to cut deals with researchers on donated genetic material before someone else can take out the gene sequence patents.

Problem is, efforts like these would require startup organizing and technical knowhow. They’d also represent a pragmatic front, one less given to whuffie-wishing, utopian grandstanding and one more willing to subvert today’s tools to solve tomorrow’s problems.