Today is World Intellectual Property Day. It’s a day to celebrate innovations, patents, and intellectual property breakthroughs and meant to inspire young innovators, future inventors, and humanity broadly.

However, as one may have gleaned from my map on copyright law a few days ago, there is a dark and extremely unfair side to intellectual property law that tech bros, gargantuan corporations, and bastions of capitalist freedom like the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America don’t want you to spend even a moment pondering.

And that is this: a plurality, and perhaps even a majority, of intellectual property patents, research findings, and breakthroughs are not so much breakthroughs as simply copyrights on well-known or commonsense ideas.

Cartographic example

Did you know that Microsoft Corp. holds the patent on choropleth maps? In 2012, Microsoft gained copyright and intellectual property ownership over the choropleth map for inventing the idea of using different color hues, values, and saturations in various areal units to visualize data over space.

What an innovation! What a breakthrough! This is amazing! I always thought PowerBI was so much better than all other mapping software somehow. They color spaces!

What this means? At any moment, Microsoft could sue you or ask for royalties when you make a choropleth map. And it’s their right. Because intellectual property rules supreme!

Now this is an extreme example, but not rare. And this is why intellectual property law is a complete ruse – intellectual property is very often not about innovation at all. It’s about monopolization of common sense and well-known ideas via patent applications and legal filings.

So how unbalanced are intellectual property laws these days? Surely, every country must play by the same rules and have equal opportunity to gobble up common ideas and make them their own, right?

Wrong. Today’s map, in celebration of intellectual property (IP) day, shows exactly how dominant Chinese and US comnpanies and institutions are securing the rights and royalty fees for nearly every idea under the sun – new and previously unpatented.

What this means? Other countries are prisoner to paying whatever these corporations, governments, and hedge funds with armies of lawyers seeking people to sue, ask. And that is not good for innovation or humanity. That’s greed and power hiding under the guise of property rights. That is the outlawing of knowledge and reason. And in my mind, it sucks. So I made a map to show just how much I think it sucks for most of the world in numbers and by industry.

View Map Here

Web Map GPT Prompt Used

# Intent
Create a web map that demonstrates how a select few extremely wealthy and powerful countries are using patents and intellectual property laws to monopolize industrial output and monetization on innovations that would otherwise benefit many more people much more widely.

We don’t have to prove this with the map. We just want to posit this argument and leave viewers with a visually stunning argument.

# Datasets

I’ve compiled a series of tables and datasets and documentation about the data that I’ve uploaded here. Please read it all carefully – particularly the metadata about the data.

# Visualization
Please create an interactive web map that allows users to see the percent of patent applications, approvals, etc., by country. This should be overall, as well as by any subfields that may be in the dataset (e.g., medical, technology, whatever you find in the dataset, as I don’t remember their names or what exactly is included).

Please create an unobtrusive selection option for data to be visualized somewhere in the UI. Begin with generic total patents and then allow the user to hone in if they like.