intellectual_property andru235 or concept hoarding? "i had this great idea first, you have to pay me tribute to use it" = 5126 b.c. "hello, my friend, i see what you are trying to do there. let me show you something." = 2xxx a.d. [oh, oops. apparently i got those dates mixed up. fig-ures.] 051027 ... andru235 MUSICIANS TAKE NOTE: =================== beethoven is the owner of G-G-G-Eflat. please do not use this sequence of notes without his permission. since he is dead, you will not be able to get his permission. so please do not use this series of notes. they are beethoven's intellectual property. 051027 ... andru235 HOORAY! I HAVE DISCOVERED THE CURE FOR THE DISEASE! but i will not allow you access to the cure unless you give me lots of money. to do otherwise would be civil - er, uncivil. wait, i'm not sure which. who knows the diffence anymore. 051027 ... andru235 difference 051027 ... andru235 MATHEMATICIANS PLEASE TAKE NOTE: ================================ euclidian geometry is the intellectual property of euclid. (duh!) he got to it first. please do not use euclidian geometry unless you have written permission from euclid. since euclid is dead you cannot acquire such permission. please do not use euclidian geometry - you don't have a right to such knowledge without his permission. 051027 ... andru235 OH, MY DEAR, DEAR, EGO! i won't share my great idea with you unless you pamper my fragile superiority complex with infusions of cash. gems also accepted. 051027 ... andru235 HEY THAT'S NOT FAIR, i patented the genetics of durham wheat - it's my intellectual property. but now they won't let me patent the genetic for this strand of human DNA. THAT DNA IS MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY! if anyone is born with that DNA they are my intellectual property! i will appeal congress with my multi-billions. 051027 ... stork daddy open source yada yada yada. you can't deny that providing some incentive besides a sense of accomplishment is a valuable way to spur scientific or artistic progress. how far should society want to extend that incentive, how far society should want to recognize monetarily the initial achievment is an open question. all achievments are based on knowledge gained from somewhere else or some other person, but society has deemed it valuable to recognize those moments when something distinct is created from past concepts, when something is distinct enough from past knowledge that it seems uniquely attributable to some individual and their unique combination of shared knowledge, their personal experience, and their mental faculties. how distinct must an idea be is a question that laws have attempted to answer. either way a lot of analysis in the realm of the useful arts and sciences depends on what your view on human motivation is. 051027 ... andru235 perhaps you mistake what i am saying? i am not setting out against people being credit for every little discovery (silly though it does seem), etc. what i am setting out against is the perhaps-excessive legal codification of a right to protect such discoveries from usage or modification by others. and i don't disagree that such recognition is an effective way to spur artistic or scientific undertakings; but as to how "valuable" and "progressive" an impetus it is seems certainly an open question as well. i do not think it is a particularily valuable "way" to spur such development; indeed, i am quite wary of it. the mere fact that it spurs development guarantees neither "value" nor "progress". the development thus spurred is unscrupulous when fame, wealth, and ego are the main motivators. edison, who made a fortune patenting other people's work, is notorious for this. his own contribution to the actual innovation of (or improvement of previous) inventions is speculated by some scholars to have been nil. thus, the "wizard" of menlo park seems to have actually been a level 15 rogue clad in a cloak of the doppelganger +3 ☺ . the names of his "employees" who did probably most of the work are unknown to most laypersons. credit aside, the person who held the power to arbitrate what was done with these inventions (edison) wasn't even the person who invented them! [for the record, most of the big developments of his "team" came long after it had become quite apparent that edison was a big smelly fortune hog. their motives were doubtfully concerned with posterity.] and edison is hardly an anomaly. my own father was the inventor of several dozen various devices - as a child i watched him build and tinker with them - however the credit and patent is now held by one of several corporations and my dad would be breaking the law if he tried to promote or modify the very thing he invented (indeed, in several cases, he cannot even legally use the product). per the mask worn by so many scientists / artists who claim to "pursue knowledge / art for its own sake" : seems to me like they are just as often seeking fame, and perhaps wealth, more than the knowledge or art. that's fine, but why the ruse? let us not pretend we have reached such a noble and benevolent era of civilization. children, children, children... david mamet's fictitious "water engine" still sits, rusting in a corporate closet, inaccessible due to someone else's intellectual property rights. the idea for "the water engine" wasn't based on observations of the martians... i'm not against recognition being granted to those who do stuff if their ego is really that in need of it. but let's not pretend it is anything other than that, because it isn't. einstein doesn't own e=mc^2; and the uncertainty principle is not enhanced by heisenberg's name being attached to it. [perhaps in artistic matters, there is a small function served, in that if an artist appeals to one's taste, anonymity would make it difficult to find other works by the same person. but even there it is of doubtful necessity that the catalogued name be the actual one, other than for the satisfaction of biographic curiousity] it's like the rest of this "property" mess. no one really "owns" land. yet if i started walking directly south for a week, here in the "land of the free," i'd be trespassing for most of the walk. there is almost nowhere in this country where one can even legally sleep without first paying ("civil?!?"). no harm would probably come of such trespassing, yet i could be arrested or fined, and perhaps given a misdemeanor. it's scarcely different with intellectual property. to protect against a few dubious crimes, we take away a hundred threatless priveleges. 051028 ... stork daddy It would seem you mistook what I said. I never claimed there was some pure motive behind rewarding inventors. I'm merely saying that for most people their primary motivator is security and opportunity within a given society, and not some vague sense of personal accomplishment. Anytime a person creates something it is somehow derivative of something else, this much is true. However, the law merely attempts to draw a line between those ideas distinct enough to be considered original, and those so derivative that the majority of the unique achievment the idea represents is still attributable to the original source. If we are to protect artists and inventors it would be a shame to draw that protection so narrowly that the most minimal of modifications somehow constitutes an original work. Could I really resell some popular work of art by crossing out the name of the original artist and pencilling mine in? After all, I've modified it. So the idea that all modifications can be allowed while still protecting the inventor is a bit dubious. If an inventor had the initiative to bring something into the world, he may desire the right to determine its useage. If an inventor feared his work would be stolen and used to achieve ill ends, he may never decide to impart it to the public. Protection of his right to sell and share his work allows him to enter his idea into society safely. You mention how development is not the samething as value or progress. I would agree that progress and value are relative terms, and that many would consider our love affair with science to not really be an example of "progress" As Martin Luther King Jr. once said "We have guided missles, but unguided hearts". My only response to this argument is that while scientific development and progress, which i will define as the increase in happiness of all humans on this earth, are not the same thing they are highly correlated. Science, if nothing else, gives us more opportunities in defining our world and our existences. So we have more opportunities to achieve happiness, by having more tools. Now of course for every invention of the computer there's an invention of a nuclear weapon, but what we do with our new opportunities is a problem of human nature. The opportunities in and of themselves increase our potential for both happiness and sadness, but on the whole increase our possibilities. This is progress in the sense that if we are able to solve the problems in human nature that always plagued us, we'll have more opportunities on the positive side than we did before. But it is also worth noting that an idea can have value and be progressive without those ends being the original goals of the person who put the idea forward. A person stricken with cancer doesn't care if the scientist who found a cure for it only did it so he could buy a nice car. That too often the wrong person gets credit is not a problem of intellectual property per se, but is a problem of being able to assign intellectual property rights, and not having enough resources to fund one's inventions, which leads to inventors and artists selling their rights to a corporation, which by definition is not accountable to the individual scientist. But the problems you mentioned are problems of capitalism and inequal distribution in resources, not problems of intellectual property law. Intellectual property is more unfair in that it validates inequal distribution of intellect. And while I think government has a role in shaping society to ideal ends, I do think that it will always have an uphill climb against our inherent distributions in abilities and desires. But I really dont' want to go into a nature/nurture debate as to the formulation of societies. I don't think anything i mentioned in my post would lead a rational person to believe that we had reached a noble benevolent era of civilization. Even if I am a child, child, child. I'm sorry to hear that about david mamet, i really am, but the law makes mistakes in any area. The question isn't is this law perfect, but is it as of yet the best design we can craft that will protect the expectations of those in our society already hold, while also foreseeing changes in circumstances and being able to adjust to them. You are right in a limited sense that of course Einstein doesn't own, in any metaphysical sense of the word, e=mc^2. But ownership is only a legal right to protection. I don't think there is anyone who understands property that doesn't assume that distinction from the getgo. This begs the question, what relationship between that equation and einstein would we be protecting. We would be protecting and extending the right he initially had before sharing his equation with the world. His right to determine in what way, what use his idea shall be put to. It is in this sense we recognize "ownership". It's an empty criticism to say that he doesn't own an abstract idea that any one is capable of thinking, merely because he hasn't locked it up in his head. That's now how we define ownership. The very fact that you are using the word own in such a way implies that you have some basic idea of property rights that is tied up in actual possession of an item. If the only time you owned something was before you blabbed your mouth about it, people would be much more reluctant to share anything with each other. It's very free-market, but it allows vultures to make as much off a kill as the lion. And in nature indeed this is how it works, but society, while not noble and enlightened, has organized enough to obey more than just the laws of physics. Society, rather, attempts to identify efficient methods of structuring human interactions. and while I like the whole noble savage idea of everyone sharing the earth and no one owning anything, I don't think we're that enlightened or noble yet, children, children, children. After all, most tenets of property law developed from rudimentary ideas of capture and conquest. I found it and claimed it first, and so it's mine. Before there were laws, people would say, that's bullshit. Then they would fight, like the Hatfields and Mccoys, until one side proved to have more effective "advocates" on its side and the other side was dead or wounded into retreat. Laws were largely developed to save people the time and energy of fighting over possession of things by setting rules of the game ahead of time that everyone could agree on. A democracy works with a system of laws to, in theory anyways, ensure people have a voice in determining exactly what "they" agree in. And the harm in trespassing is if we were not to recognize it as a per se rule, we'd have to be bogged down constantly in whether any harm actually occurred in the trespass. You can sleep there fine, can you hold a campout there? Can you have a music festival? If ownership of land is to be meaningful, it must include a right to exclude. We can't stand on the same spot at once due to laws of physics, so who has a right to that land? Well, we could fight over it, we could flip a coin. The law has attempted to find an approach more tailored towards human nature, while at least trying to limit if not eliminate the uglinesses of human nature. And so in conclusion I wouldn't say that intellectual property takes away a hundred threatless priveleges to stop a few dubious crimes. It recognizes a crime to prevent a hundred threatless privileges from becoming dubious crimes. I should also ask where exactly does a privilege come from? What is a privilege? Are you arguing you should be allowed to do something just because you're able to? Your argument seems to turn on whether there is a harm or not. The harm of course is in the widespread effects that could take place should there be no intellectual property law. All laws are imperfect and will in some cases lead to a result that is not in keeping with the values underlying it, but a law by definition is something of general application. This isn't to say that intellectual property law needs no improvement, or that for sure more emphasis can be put on the nature of the attempted use, rather than a blanket prohibition (as is the case less often than you might think) on all use of a protected idea, but the argument you seem to be making is that there is no justification whatsoever for any form of intellectual property law. You mentioned that sure inventors should be recognized somehow, but failed to describe how this would be done, if the moment an idea leaves them it is no longer in any meaningful way theirs. Look, I understand your motivation. I wish people weren't so shitty too. But short of revolution, I don't see how you are going to abolish the idea of private property in a democracy where people vote on their self interest and don't appear to be losing self interest anytime soon. Furthermore, while in theory a government without private property seems workable, every application of it thus far (while not used as directed) has not been very workable (and i know, that depends on your definitin of workable, so i'm just going to say has resulted in more misery than happiness for its constituents). 051028 ... andru235 you articulated several things which i had not considered. and i thank you, for that is one of the very reasons that i blathe as i do. for the record i did not intend to imply that *you* were the "child, child, child." i guess i can see where it looked like that, though. my apologies. it is my view that we are more or less all children. frankly, i'm not entirely against intellectual_property rights. but, for reasons already listed as well as for others, i am quite leary of property rights that prohibit other's enjoyment and tinkering with the very same thing. 051028 what's it to you? who go blather from