From: ChuckKuecker (ckuecker@mcs.net)
Date: Wed May 06 1998 - 18:55:49 MDT
At 15:33 5/6/98 -0400, Dan Fabulich wrote:
>"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
>exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea,
>which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to
>himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
>possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
>Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because
>every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me,
>receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his
>taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should
>freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual
>instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been
>peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like
>fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any
>point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have out physical
>being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then
>cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." - Thomas Jefferson
>
A beautiful idea, that only awaits a purer world than we presently have..
Chuck Kuecker
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