John Courtneidge wrote:
> Ä Firstly, all knowledge pre-exists our discovery of it, and, so, any
^^^^^^^^^
> individual or group claim upon it, is theft from the commonweal.
>
> (Issac Newton, for example, didn't invent gravity nor the various
^^^^^^
> descriptions of it - they were all there to be found.)
and REH replied:
> You make a very good case for not paying composers, painters,
> movie directors and other artists. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I say:
3 different categories of "knowledge" have been mixed up here:
a) discoveries (e.g. the laws of gravity),
b) inventions (e.g. the transistor), and
c) works of art & literature (e.g. a novel).
Our legal systems offer different protection for these categories:
a) none
b) patent
c) copyright
The protections (b) and (c) give a commercial incentive, but are limited
in time (something like (b) 17 years and (c) 70 years, with some variations)
and limited in extent (e.g. the basic *ideas* are not copyrighted), to
prevent progress, culture and competition from being clogged up. (E.g.
Micro$oft was allowed to copy features of a graphical user interface
despite Apple's lawsuit.)
While John's statement "all knowledge pre-exists our discovery of it"
obviously applies to (a), it doesn't apply to (b) and (c), so it's hard
to talk of "theft from the commonweal". The commonweal consists of the
basic elements (e.g. materials for (b), the alphabet for (c)), but the
created inventions and works did NOT pre-exist their creation. They
enter the commonweal only when their period of protection expires or
if their creator(s) renounce to their rights.
On a sidenote, you may wonder how software can be a "work of art&literature".
Well, basically that's what the lawyers of the planet decided it is, since
they were too lazy to create a new legal category, and don't understand too
much of programming. ;-)
REH continued:
> The best the local
> Georgists or others can seem to come up with is scarcity. Make it scarce
> enough and it will grow in value and make compensation happen. Of
> course it didn't and doesn't work that way with intellectual capital.
> Scarcity just means your consumers grow dumb and don't know the difference
> between having it and not. Same problem with software.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Not quite. Compare M$-Windows with Linux and look where the intellectual
scarcity is.
Greetings,
Chris
