Diction & IP

One of Michael Heller's solutions in his "solutions tool kid" is to re-define the vocabulary that we use to speak about intellectual property. By adding the words of underuse and anticommons to our daily vocabulary, we will begin to notice all the gridlock surrounding us. He later argues that we need to "get the labels right" such as re-terming the word "antitrust" which, according to Heller, "misleads regulators and harms consumers." These snippets of Heller's suggests for changing the way IP works in today's society revolve solely around how we refer to things, because the vocabulary we use to talk around IP, or any other issue for that matter, has a profound way of affecting how we think of something. While we'd all like to be able to think about things using the strict dennotative definition of everything, we can't help but also associate certain words with certain things. Connotations are just as powerful, if not more so, than dennotations and by changing the our diction, we might find that we're tackling the ideas of IP from a completely different perspective. In the realm of IP, we're only limited by the way our mind chooses to think about something.