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Patent offices are national organisations, usually run by the government, and they generally deal with certification of intellectual property (ideas, inventions, etc) to ensure royalties are paid if anyone wants to use that property.

In a capitalist society, their importance is related to the cost of innovation and invetion – why go to all that expense if other people could come along and steal your idea? How would you make a profit if that happened? By patenting an idea or invention, anyone else who has the same idea or wants to use your idea has to pay you to use it. A patent allows its owner to gain control over whatever is described by the patent which means that they have control over anyone who needs to use that patent.

Almost any idea or invention can be patented, so long as someone didn't beat you to it. For example, Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force in which the mother is spun round at high speed on a centrifuge causing at sufficient speed to make the child to literally fly out of her and be caught by a neo-natal net before hitting it has chance to splat against the wall. They say there's a fine line between genius and insanity. That line has been crossed:

Amazingly, nobody else had thought of this – so it was easy to patent.

Rather than just have one central patent office for the entire planet, each country has their own patent. If you want to patent something worldwide, you've got to apply to each country's patent office, and there's quite a few of them. But it's worth it, because patents are very valuable.

If someone else has the same idea after you, they can't just use that idea – they have to pay you because you patented it first. For this reason patents often use vague and ambiguous language to increase the chances that future ideas, even if not exactly the same as your original idea, can be blocked by your patent. And that means more money for the patent holder.

Then there's patent trolls – people or companies that register or buy patents and then proceed to sue anyone and everyone that they can. A good example is a company called Uniloc - they patented a simple math operation and then tried to sue companies hosting Linux servers. Luckily, the judge disqualified the patent because any attempt to patent simple math would have such far reaching effects that society would grind to a halt.

In recent years, there's been a big push to patent nature. Companies like Monsanto have created genetically modified organisms (GMOs) so that they can patent them. They call themselves "A sustainable agriculture company" – which is corporate-speak for "We've found a way to make sustainable profits from agriculture": Mess around with nature so it can be patented, controlled and thus more profitable.

Even the human genome is gradually being patented. When combined with successful trials of GMO humans (we don't get to hear about what happened to the earlier failed attempts) and artificial wombs it's easy to see where things are heading. Soon humans will be patented products just like everything else, just scan the QR code on the back of their neck or the subdermal RFID implant for warranty information. Want kids? Design them and place your order online, all major credit cards accepted. I guess once humans are commercial products, we can treat them like robots because we own them, right? Need someone to clean the house and do the ironing – buy a GM human slave. Just remember to recycle them when you no longer need them, or maybe sell them on eBay? Oh, and you can't have your own babies because you don't own the patent to human DNA.

In a money based economy, like our current capitalist society, patents are all about control and profit. Everything must be controlled, because everything is about making a profit.

But let's not dwell too much on how patents currently function. What's much more interesting is that opening question: "What would a Patent Office look like in a society that ditched money?"

In a free world, there would only be one patent office: A giant online wiki where people can find, share and collaborate on ideas:

• Want to find an idea? Search the wiki, optionally with advanced search criteria.
• Thought of a way to improve an existing idea? Discuss it in the wiki page comments, and if people agree, update the wiki page.
• Using an idea in your project? Watch the wiki page and get notifications when improvements are discussed or confirmed.
• Want to know who's using an idea so you can ask them how it's working out for them? Look at the list of watchers on the wiki page.
• Want to see how an idea has evolved over time? Look at the revision history of the wiki page.
• Want to cross-reference similar ideas? Add labels/tags (folksonomy) to the wiki page.
• Worried about infringing on someone else's patent? Don't worry, there's no such concept in a free world!

In a free world, even GM humans would be free – not just of cost, but of ownership.