Skunk;195700 Wrote: > > Also, isn't owning an idea called a patent?
At least originally, patents were granted only for very specific devices or processes (not for ideas in general), and gave you the right to limit who could produce or use them *for profit*. There isn't anything illegal about building a patented device for your own use. So patents really aren't at all like ownership - they merely provide a limited form of control over commerce in that item. Now that things like gene sequences are patented, the situation is becoming rather less clear - but that's exactly the kind of slippage that worries me. It's interesting to think about how the world would change if copyrights didn't exist. Does anyone really think artists would stop making art, or musicians stop making music? If patents didn't exist, would that stop university researchers, or secret industrial research? It seems to me (following Thomas Jefferson) that the benefits to society would be enormous. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34366 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
