On Friday 09 November 2001 03:27 am, DeBug wrote: > Since unmaterial things are unlimited they cannot be > a property. So intellectual property is a nonsence, copyrights are > nonsence, patents are nonsence.
Although property is an efficient means to allocate scarce resources, it does not follow that scarcity is necessary to property. Certainly applying traditional concepts of property to software, literature and music is erroneous, but that does not mean that you must toss out intellectual property altogether. Unless specifically outlawed, forms of intellectual property are going to exist in any economic system, simply because people want them. If there were no copyright laws, then other mechanisms, both public and private, will be used to protect the authors' "rights". Hammer's "Intellectual Property Rights Viewed As Contracts" (http://freenation.org/a/f32h3.html) is one article that examines this scenario. It is also the accompaniment to Long's "The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights" (http://freenation.org/a/f31l1.html) that GNU cites on its webpage. The question to ask is not "how do we abolish intellectual property", but rather "how can we live with intellectual property". Open Source Software is one answer. Through voluntary action, education, and gentle persuasion we can make the rights to copy, distribute and modify assumed attributes of software. > I have asked you several times how can i avoid controlling my software > but it seems the only solution is to remove unjust laws - the laws that > postulate and regulate the control of unlimited resources... Unfortunately, you are not going to be able to remove those unjust laws. We've been trying to do that for the last five thousand years with only the most limited of successes. But if you don't want to control your software, there is another avenue besides lobbying an unresponsive legislature: and that is to simply not control it. It's much easier than trying to get a law passed to prevent you from doing what you're not going to do anyway :-) Placing your works into the public domain is impractical. But placing them under an extremely unrestrictive license is not. I would suggest the MIT license as the most unrestrictive that already approved by the OSI. -- David Johnson ___________________ http://www.usermode.org pgp public key on website -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
