On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Bruce Ediger wrote: > On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Brian Loe wrote: > > > Without intellectual property rights what would our world look like > > right now? Even the opensource community has copyrights... (or do they > > call them copylefts?) > > Think "USA before 1909": http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html > This period arguably constituted the period of the most rapid technological > change in the USA's history. I don't doubt a correlation. > > Before 1909, the USA did not respect copyrights registered in other countries. > > Yes, the USA, My Country, was an IP outlaw, like Singapore and Taiwan today. > > Some academic research exists to support this sort of system: > http://minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr357.pdf > > Boldrin and Levine have published other papers on the subject. > > Some philosophical objections to copyright also exist: > http://libertariannation.org/a/f31l1.html > > I doubt those will make much impression on you. The way you phrase your > question seems to indicate that you believe that "IP rights" should exist > to protect the ideas that you and/or other people come up with. That's > a false basis for reasoning from, at least in terms of copyright law. > The basis of copyright law is to get people to disclose ideas by giving > them a short period of state-enforced monopoly, during which the inventor > can extract monopoly rents. > > That's a whole lot different than the concept of intellectual *property*. > Ideas and concepts basically aren't "property" in the sense that a car > or a house or a factory building are property. Your car can be stolen, > depriving you of the use of it. However, if someone copies my ideas about > writing a checker-playing program, neither I nor my program are deprived of > the use of those ideas. I'd just like to point out that ideas aren't copyrightable.
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