In 1859 Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking work 'The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'. The previous year he had been sent an essay by a fellow biologist working in the Indonesian rainforest, Alfred Russel Wallace, entitled, in true Victorian style 'On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type'. Darwin realised that they had both independently discovered the process of 'mutability' (now called evolution) and arranged for the simultaneous publication of both their findings by the Linnean Society.

The social critic, Ivan Illich, who died in 2002, wrote his most well-known books - 'Tools for Conviviality', 'Deschooling Society', 'Disabling Professions' and 'The Right to Useful Unemployment' - in the 1970's. If these had been written twenty years later it is difficult to imagine that he would not have seized upon the monopolisation and commodification of software and cyberspace to help illustrate his case. His ideas are more relevant today than they have ever been.

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The advocates of patents often argue that they are necessary to promote innovation by providing inventors with a financial incentive. If this were really true then no progress would have occurred in centuries preceding our own when patents were unknown. It is more reasonable to ask whether the rapid scientific and artistic progress in those earlier centuries would have happened if knowledge had been private property.

The corporate launch of GM foods and crops involved a ruthless global battle plan in which the public were seen as an enemy to be bypassed or defeated. The plan worked flawlessly for a few years then backfired catastrophically from 1998 onwards. Representatives of the industry took over all the governmental and intergovernmental regulatory bodies - including, in the USA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the post of Secretary of Agriculture and, in the UK, the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes and the Royal Society - to name but a few.

"When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you get an idea before any one else, you take out a patent on it: it is yours. So with me: I own the stars, because nobody else before me ever thought of owning them" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 'The Little Prince'

The copyright battle over the dire and fictional 'Da Vinci Code', between it's author, Dan Brown, and Enzo Fardone, author of the equally dire and fictional 1982 book 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail', is just one of the more recent highlights in the long history of claims of plagiarism.

In the final days of the Trojan wars the Greeks left outside Troy a gift for the Trojans - a giant wooden horse. Once the Trojans had opened the gates and wheeled the gift into their city they discovered, too late, that it was full of Greek soldiers. The lesson from this incident is always to look a gift horse in the mouth - and the gifts offered by some western nations to facilitate Third World development are no exception, whether they be food and seeds or computers and software.

Here are a few smart ideas for making a fast buck (and losing your friends):

Does Africa need digital handouts or economic independence? When leaders of the eight wealthiest nations in the world met at Gleneagles in 2005 for the G8 summit to discuss the future of Africa, the question of what kind of development Africa needs, and where computing fits in the mix remained unanswered.