From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Thu Jul 18 2002 - 11:48:59 MDT
LC> Yes, that's the core of our argument; you feel that making use of
LC> someone else's creative work is morally wrong, for some reason.
LC> I don't. But I also think the burden of proof should be on the
LC> side favoring restrictive laws: freedom should be assumed, absent
LC> a very compelling reason to restrict it...
BW> Essentially I see ideas as the property of the first individual to
BW> come up with them, I am not alone in this, as that what copyright
BW> law is all about.
That's actually a fairly recent idea; what copyright law was "all
about" when it was first created was entirely different: it was
nothing more or less than a deliberate economic stimulus. Give a
limited monopoly to a publisher to encourage more publishing (only
later was the right given to the author). The problem with the
"ownership" concept is that it creates a bottleneck for all the
possible uses of an idea.
I think of ideas more as children. I may have created them and
nurtured them (and I may get to exploit their labor for a short
time :-) but once they grow up they are fully autonomous and I no
longer have any right to control--nor can I even imagine--what
might become of them.
> What I particularly have a problem with is people profiting from
> using other peoples ideas. I'll give you a personnal example.
I'm not particularly moved by this specific example since the
"idea" in question was so obvious that likely thousands of people
thought of it, but I'm sure there are many other stories more
moving. But even so, for each story you can tell about some
author or inventor's idea that was "stolen", I can tell 10 stories
about some other author or inventor's derivative work that was
completely supressed by IP law. Which is the greater evil, that
ideas get made and marketed, possibly profiting the people who
did the marketing more than the creator, or that ideas never get
to market no matter how good they are and don't get to make
anyone rich?
Michael brings up a legitimate point (which is why I engage in
these discussions in the first place!) that in a world without
IP protection, authors and inventors would be more reluctant to
reveal their ideas. That's certainly true to a degree--without
the government protecting your market for you, you'll have to
do it yourself. But what's the difference between a system where
ideas are jealously guarded while they develop and while their
creators wring what profit they can out of the secrecy (after
which they become fully public), and the present system where
ideas are released sooner but legally constrained from being
used for decades? It seems to me that both systems would end up
putting the same amount of creative work into the public domain
in the long run, but the former system would be simpler, freer,
and put thousands of IP lawyers out of work.
> I have other ideas which would be every bit as popular,
> (moneymaking) but it will be a cold day in hell before I share
> them.
And this is an argument /for/ IP? If your ideas can be stolen
under the present system anyway, wouldn't it be better if that
were everyone's expectation in the first place, so that people
knew they had to be careful and sign NDAs and such while looking
for people to do all the other work of making money on the idea,
or else do all the other work themselves?
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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