Hi Rick, > R > ...if the scheme of IP rights inspires someone to > create a new or better idea, that they would not > have otherwise created if > they didn't think they could profit off of it, is > that really "prostitution"?
Prostitution does sound like a strong charge, but if a person exchanges values across levels, such as exchanging sex (biological) for money (social), the MOQ would say that a prostitution, or immoral exchange, of value has taken place. To be consistent, the MOQ would also have to say that the same kind of thing is happening when intellectual patterns are sold. In the first case the money is tainted by the sex, and in the second the ideas are tainted by the money. I admit that Pirsig does not explicitly discuss the morality of trading value between levels, but the conclusion I draw above seems to me to be a natural consequence of his moral taxonomy. IP law's promise of a nice reward might motivate people to carry through with their ideas, and that is indeed an important element, but I don't think this promise inspires the ideas themselves. I tend to think that an intellectual pursuit has to be its own reward, a personal one. > R > What if the license holder is > collecting fees to recoup > his investment rather than to profit, would that be > different? I would be > very interested to hear your thoughts on that > question. Yes, I think that would be different. You could argue that there are a lot of social costs and costs in materials that get included in intellectual investments. It is moral to recoup those. > R > And yet, Pirsig doesn't give LILA away for free (in > fact, I surmise that he > has become quite wealthy repeatedly selling the > movie rights to ZMM and then > letting them revert to himself). Of course, that > doesn't mean you're not > right about what the MoQ would conclude (Phaedrus's > conclusion that it's > immoral to eat meat when other foods are available > doesn't stop him from > chowing down on a juicy steak just one chapter > later). Pirsig once gently explained how all the seeming moral hypocracies in Lila could be sidestepped. You see it was Pirsig who stated that it's immoral to eat meat but it was Phaedrus who actually did the eating. You don't think a fictional character has to agree with everything the author believes, do you? Ha ha ha. As to McWatt's and Glover's efforts to profit off of Pirsig's ideas - my topic question asked more generally about the morality of selling intellectual ideas, but no matter; whether these ideas are your own or someone else's, the same reasoning applies and the same conclusions are drawn: intellectual ideas should not be prostituted for social gain. A friend of mine pointed out the moral precedence of intellectual ideas in these two cases quite simply by stating, "If this is such an important breakthrough in philosophical thought, I would want everybody to know for nothing". If you sell a book that contains intellectual ideas, the MOQ implies that the moral course is to charge the customer based on the costs of printing, binding, and shipping the book, along with other social costs, but not the ideas therein. It follows that if you were to borrow such a book it shouldn't cost you anything, and this is the thinking behind Ben Franklin's free public library system. There is a certain irony in Ant's and Glove's enterprising efforts to make money off the MOQ and McWatt, who is charging $30 for a mere PDF file, is the more morally dubious. On the other hand, we might take a different tack and revisit the agreement from a few months ago that money is a social pattern. If money is seen instead as more of a purified form of static value potential that is exchangable with value at any level, then we might be less psychologically burdened by the immorality of inter-level exchanges. Glenn __________________________________________________________________ Switch to Netscape Internet Service. As low as $9.95 a month -- Sign up today at http://isp.netscape.com/register Netscape. Just the Net You Need. New! Netscape Toolbar for Internet Explorer Search from anywhere on the Web and block those annoying pop-ups. Download now at http://channels.netscape.com/ns/search/install.jsp MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_focus/ MF Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from moq_focus follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/mf/subscribe.html
