Most of us would be glad to have our stuff copied and distributed across the world.
Those of us who make money on our writings probably don't provide much treasure to copiers.
The major best seller writers don't have to worry about copying either. Procedures can be set up to deal with any copiers with offsets in their basements.
As you see, I don't agree with either copyright, or patents. The only real protection they give is to the big battalions - the grunts are overwhelmed.
Harry
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Brad wrote:
Lawrence DeBivort wrote:Gosh, I hate to quibble with Moyers, but this may be more than a quibble: copyright protects not an idea but text. Whatever I write is protected (except for fair use provisions), But the idea that I am writing about is not, /per se, /protected. Anyone can freely express the same idea, and as long as they do it with substantially different words (or text) there is no infringement.
[snip]I would once again refer to Elizabeth Eisenstein's _The Printing Press as an Agent of Change_. Before the printing press, the notion of copyright would have been intellectually suicidal for an author: In manuscript culture, the only way your ideas could survive was if people copied them. "Please, everybody, copy my text!" -- Does the "digital revolution" mean anything when push comes to shove (i.e., when $$$ are involved), or is it just fun words to mouth? If the digital revolution is no revolution in copyright, perhaps it is no revolution anywhere else in our once new but now in its turn ancien regime of "representative deomcracy" and "free market enterprise". I have long felt Joseph Weizenbaum was on to something important when he said that the computer was one of the most powerful forces for social reaction in the 20th century. \brad mccormick
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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