From: Mike Linksvayer (ml@gondwanaland.com)
Date: Fri Sep 18 1998 - 12:08:47 MDT
On Fri, Sep 18, 1998 at 11:46:33AM +0100, Charlie Stross wrote:
> Copyright was
> introduced because the effects of _not_ restricting the ownership of
> copying rights to the originator of a work were damaging the ability
> of those originators to support themselves, producing more work;
Copyright was introduced to protect the profits of publishers, not
originators, although that justification was later used. See
"Intellectual Property: A Non-Posnerian Law and Economics Approach"
by Tom G. Palmer in the Hamline Law Review, 1989, pp. 261-304 and
the cover story of the September Atlantic magazine on IP for
discussions of this.
I feel that the property status of information will be the single
greatest non-engineering factor in shaping societies of the next
century. If we continue down the path of increasing property
protections for information we will likely have a society run by
state/corporate cartels with huge disparities of wealth between
information owners and non-owners and a very boring culture.
However, I feel that anything qualifying as a "singularity" will
be engineering-driven. Nanotech implies drastic changes irregardless
of the property regime it occurs in, short of a totalitarian one
that could completely control access to the technology.
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