Doug Lerner wrote: >A little common sense can apply here. Certainly there are some examples >that are obvious. For example, the letter "a" is obviously public domain. >But C code that actually does something useful and was created with the >effort of a developer - that is obviously different, isn't it? > >Dirt anybody can find in the ground. It doesn't mean that a beautiful >clay pot that somebody creates then belongs to everybody, does it? > OK, I'm getting way off topic here, so feel free to tell me to shut up. The problem, IMHO, is philosophical, and lies in the concept of property itself. Societies based on a more-or-less Western, more-or-less capitalist, more-or-less industrial model tend to regard prototypical property as manufactured exchangable physical objects. Intellectual property is a metaphorical extension of that notion, so we "own" an idea in the same way that we "own" a pot. One reaction, popular in Free Software circles, is to say that this analogy is false - you can own a pot but you can't own an idea. I believe this reaction is also based on false premises. If what makes a pot yours is your labour (as Locke claimed) then the labour you have put into a computer program should also make it yours - more so, in fact, since it does not rely on appropriation of common property (the dirt Doug mentions). Or does it? Ideas come from other ideas which are common property in much the same way as dirt is. A pot cannot be _wholly_ someone's property because it contains common property, not only in the form of dirt (or rather clay, which is not as common or worthless) but also in terms of ideas accumulated over thousands of years of ceramics. All this goes to show that property as an absolute concept is unworkable. A society _may_ choose to give certain people exclusive use of certain objects or ideas, and to give them the right to exchange these things, but only if this works for the benefit of all concerned. Ownership is no more than a convenient fiction. Robin
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