Dear Bill,

I thought you might wish to be updated on an exciting development. I trust you would recall the draft thesis I was preparing under your supervision in the summer of 1990. You have mentored it and have selected one chapter of the entire draft as my graduation thesis, the historic part devoted to studying the roots of intellectual property law. It has subsequently been published in IDEA. (Mladen Vukmir, “The Roots Of Anglo-American Intellectual Property Law In Roman Law” (1991), 32 IDEA 123, HeinOnline). I am still thankful for your efforts in the midst of summer to getting the text fit for publication. I guess it makes both of us happy to see that it gets cited until this day.

You might recall that chapter 3 of the draft book has been devoted to studying the underlying natures of property and creativity. I have used the Shannon-Weaver theory of information in order to set the foundations for a model of creativity that presumed that nature is essentially binary and that human capacity to make choices between the zero and one, in its consequence, amounts to creating material reality. Content of this chapter, which I have deemed to be central for the thesis was presumably seen as too weird and ultimately unfounded for a lawyer not trained in physics to venture into. Accordingly we skirted working on it and I have discontinued drafting it and have deposited the entire book as it was at the US Copyright later that summer during my stay at the Library of Congress in DC.

Now, The Economist magazine recently reviewed a title that caught my immediate attention as it dealt smack on with the topic of my original interest. I was elated after having assessed the impact of the recently published book, because having a luminary of Prof. Vedral’s stature researching the very topic I found so central in understanding our society and nature promises to have major implication for our understanding of the world. Not least, in the process it might have my views confirmed and put to some serious use in social sciences after twenty years of dormant state. Just as in quantum physics, we need to be observed in order to perform and I do hope that Vlatko’s seminal work will shed some new light on the possible social implications of his grand theory. I hope that my small contribution can enrich the implication of his theory to the social sphere. Here is the link to the review: Vedral.

I have immediately ordered Prof. Vedral’s books from Amazon: Amazon Vedral. Now I am awaiting the receipt of the books to verify how much of overlap there actually is. In the meantime I’ve written to Vlatko in a hope that he will have time to do similar assessment and give me an insight on true (or false ;-), reading I had of the scope of my intuition in relation to his theory. I am still waiting for his reply and am rather excited about it. I am so free as to attach my emails to him for your reference. His web site is at: Vedral Blog and I happily note him holding an electric guitar there. This might remind you of my own rock critic’s past and I found some pleasure in this coincidence, not to mention that we were at the time both born in the same country.

I am also attaching the Chapter 3 of the book to this mail . I have uploaded now the entire draft as an e-book at the Amazon Digital Text Platform. You can see it also as subsequently published electronically: Vukmir Amazon. I am looking forward to seeing you soon in Boston.

Best regards, Mladen