On Feb 25, 2009, at 12:41 PM, Chris Miller wrote:
If your original ideas were good ones, why not let everyone take
credit for
them? Without copyright, the plagiarizers will themselves be
plagiarized.
Isn't the circulation of good ideas more important than anybody's
reputation?
In discussions of individual v. community rights, private property
rights v. public interests, etc., there is a well-known "Problem of
the Commons," used as an example of how certain concomitants of each
position manifest themselves. It goes like this:
In the village, there arose a dispute about who should take care of
the large pasturage in the middle of the residences. Should the
village control the Commons and allow everyone to pasture their own
stock in the open? Or should it be divided among the villagers who
lived adjacent to it. They tried it first as an open area, owned in
common, i.e., no individual controlled it or any part. Soon, they
discovered that it had been overgrazed, the ground eroded by rains
that washed away the soil that now had not grass to anchor it, etc.
Since no one owned it, no one took care of it nor took care not to
overgraze (because it was the other stock that were overgrazing the
grass, not mine). They decided to divide the Commons into equal sized
lots give them to each landowner. The landowners put up fences or
hedgerows, tended their own small part, and made sure that their own
stock did not overgraze their land (because they were not permitted to
graze anywhere else). The land recovered, the grass grew, the place
looked good again.
Private copyrights protect creative works from their own form of
defilement in the Commons. They can be protected, their completeness
and integrity better secured, etc., in private ownership rather than
with Jack Sparrow and the Plagiarizers of the Caribbean. (Like that
metahpor? It's kinda clever, I think. I just made it up. Yeah, that's
the ticket.)
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
