[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/13/10, Richard Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:
>     I think there's some harm to society, even if relatively minimal, in
>     restricting mashup use of imagery (all the trademark "dilution" crap).
>      It still falls under the heading of ownership of an idea.

> A logo is an image, not an idea.  And trademark law only concerns marketing,
>  not the contents of artistic works.  So trademark law does not involve
>  "owning an idea".
>
>  Neither does copyright law.  Copyright law explicitly excludes ideas.
>
>  To find a generalization to cover all these laws (and a dozen more) is
>  not going to be easy.  You will have to drop the "owning an idea"
>  approach, and find another.

I'm using "idea" in a sense of "pattern of information," which includes images.

>  You might be able to make it work -- I once saw a definition which was
>  written by experts and took several lines -- but it serves no useful
>  purpose.  These laws are very different from each other.  What they
>  have in common is so meager and abstract that it is not important.  To
>  generalize about them is a bad habit, so why struggle to continue it.
>
>  If we want to think about good policies, we have to think at the level
>  of specific laws.

I guess our mileage just differs.  For some reason, the whole idea
that ideas/patterns of information can be owned just seems to click
intuitively as the misconceived idea at the root of all ideas of IP,
and I feel driven to combat them by attacking that root assumption.
But again, "let a thousand flowers bloom" and all that.

>  The term "IP" was chosen to falsify their history, to invent a
>  fictional common root for them, which misleads people about all of
>  them.  The way to strike at this falsificatoin is to reject the term
>  "intellectual property", and explain that these laws are separate
>  issues.

But I oppose them even as separate issues, so I find some value in
taking the falsification as a handy target presented to me by the
enemy.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html