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.

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I have an affinity for New Zealand and Australia. I have some dear friends down under, and every time I’ve visited those two countries, I’ve thought: if only I could be so lucky as to live here some day. Alas, it hasn’t happened yet.

It pains me that the US these days is throwing aside its years of cooperation with these countries. To add insult to injury, I even had to pay a tariff on the Australian-themed socks my friend Rachel sent me and the family for Christmas last year. This is an impeachable offense in my mind.)

As President Trump belittles US allies’ historic contributions to US interests and global security these days, I thought it would be fitting to create a map of all the sacrifices ANZAC has made to support the two most recent world hegemonies – Great Britain and the United States.

I used my new favorite dataset creator assistant first to develop a layered database schema of ANZAC soldiers who have lost their lives in combat. I then had it produce a schema and fill the dataset on battles, campaigns, naval actions, and prison camps that ANZAC service members have died, been injured, or taken capture in. I had it split it by country (New Zealand and Australia) for more nuanced analysis – as I know my friend Sam in Blenheim would roll over in his grave if I forced New Zealanders to always be aggregated with Australians. (He was quite the zealot that way. RIP.)

It’s not perfect. And I didn’t have time to create the soldier casualty lookup for each battle, but I hope to return to it in the future, when I’m not making daily maps…. so 2027?!

Thank you for your service, ANZAC veterans and fallen members. I appreciate it and am grateful, even though you were attacking some of my ancestors in Europe at times. Sorry I didn’t have more time to spend on this map.

P.S. Dear US Government: I expect to be reimbursed for your illegal tariff on my socks!

View map here

Original Prompt in Web Map GPT

Hi. I’ve provided a JSON with a schema, etc., for map design, etc. I’ve also uploaded a variety of CSV and MD documents that provide datasets, schemas, and definitions for a variety of things. Please peruse all of these documents, etc. Then, use the CSV dataset(s) to create a web map to the JSON spec AND your own knowledge and rules based on maps you’ve created for me before. Where are there major contradictions, please revert to your typical guidelines.

If you have questions, please just let me know. Thank you. There should be 50+ events. If you only see ~20, the CSV file isn’t uploading properly. I will try to remedy this. Thanks!

—
{
“project”: {
“name”: “ANZAC Commemorative Map”,
“title”: “In Memoriam”,
“subtitle”: “The Geography of ANZAC Service and Loss”,
“tagline”: “ANZAC Day Commemorative Map”,
“purpose”: “Respectful, historically grounded interactive map showing ANZAC service and loss across time and space”
},

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I remember Chernobyl. It was terrifying, because watching the news, no one in the US seemed to know what was going on over in the Soviet Union. And Ronald Reagan seemed a bit senile at the time.

As a kid that was scary. Now that I’ve grown up, I realize it’s true: no one, in any political institution from the household to the United Nations really has any freaking clue of what’s going on. And acceptable levels of senility apparently have an appreciating scale among US presidents.

I was excited to make a map about Chernobyl until I discovered an an absolutely stellar atlas on the Chernobyl disaster done by Harvard University. So there was no sense creating an inferior product in 30 minutes to compete with that. Seriously, check out their work here. Kudos and wonderful work.

But… always the devil’s advocate, there is a major irony I still don’t understand in many of my friends’ and family members’ contemporary views on nuclear power – which are almost universally anti-nuclear. These fears are not data based. (And that’s okay. I still love the Minnesota Twins baseball team, even though all the data says I should have given up on them in 2001.) But for those that say they are into rational, data-based decision-making, particularly about the environment, I feel like nuclear gets short shrift.

But I digress. Nuclear power is not as popular as other sustainable technologies, but… Though the disasters like Chernobyl and Fukishima were certainly very real to those affected, they pale in comparison to the energy disaster that continues to kill tens of thousands – indeed, potentially hundreds of thousands – around the world every year. Coal-powered energy may be killing you or your neighbors right now, depending on where you live. (Radon too but that’s a map for Celebrate Radon Day, I imagine.)

That’s right: coal kills magnitudes more than other energy types, particularly nuclear. How much more. That’s what I try to show you in today’s map. 🙂

View Map Here

Prompt Used in WebMapGPT

# Intent
Chernobyl Remembrance Day is coming up soon. I would like to release a map on that day showing just how deadly coal is and continues to be by comparison.

The map should be antagonistic in nature – anti-coal power and subtly pro-nuclear power.

# Design
You may use devise a design plan that requires me to design and include PNGs or SVGs as icons, symbols, or embedded images. Just let me know.

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