Ryan S. Dancey wrote:
>The original intent of the copyright and
>patent laws was to give creative people a limited right to exploit their
>creations before the public gained full access to those creations in order
>to stimulate innovation. Over the last 225 years, the law has become less
>and less interested in >ever< returning those rights to the public and has
>become a tool to perpetuate the exclusive rights conveyed essentially
>forever.
Jefferson on the terms of copyright:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/bplist/archive/1999-02-11$2.html
"The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither
powers nor rights over it."
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789
And TJ on the concept of owning an idea:
Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less [of an
idea], because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an
idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he
who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That
ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the
moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition,
seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when
she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening
their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move,
and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive
appropriation.
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
-Andrew
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