Creative minds are beginning to realize that there is
nothing that they can create which a cadred of corporate
lawyers cannot take away in the court system.
But to begin with, look at the legal, versus real concept
of a corporation. It was invented so that the rich investors
did not risk their own personal assets regardless of what
the corporation did to generate profits for them. You got
that? They can use their corporation to steal from you, and
there is no moral or legal recorse beyond the value of the
corporation, which may be no more than an empty shell.
Despite the legal definition of a corporation as a 'person'
with rights to use the legal system, it is in fact, a thing,
like a beach. It has no intrinsic morals or moral authority.
You cannot steal from a corporatation any more than you can
steal from a beach.
With regards to software, the canon of collected work is now
so vast that there is no way any one creative mind could know
whether, or to what extent a work is 'original'. If panels of
programmers were to judge originality, that would be one thing.
But software is like a chess game. Were we to rely on the courts
who are not chess masters, to judge whether a give position or
sequence of moves was elegant and original, it would not be hard
to demonstrate, to anyone who realy understands the game, that
the court simply lacks the mental capability to decide. Some of
us have the innate talent to create and understand software, and
most of us dont. You havta be somewhat of an idiot savant, to
be able to focus the mind closely enough to understand assembly.
Judges are selected because they have the social skills to be the
friends of those we elect to office. With software, they are
clueless.
I have seen the same with literature; when a given piece of work
strikes a chord, corporations have seen this, and had hacks write
screen plays with only the names changed in the movie. Again, the
legions of lawyers and donations to the Judge's IRA's in the form
of inside stock tips guarantee that were any work by any author
be worth enough money,.. they will take it away from him.
They are, after all, corporate interests, with profit the only
mandate. They have no souls which suffer Kharma from what they do
to others.
It has a lot to do with why programmers are moving to open source.
they know they cannot get money for their work directly. but once
a useful piece of work is produced, it becomes an advertisment for
the talent that produced it, and as we see with Linus Torvals, the
creator can use it to hang on his consulting shingle... where he
makes his money.
I have paid registration for SHAREWARE, but doubt I'll ever do it
again. That which I still find useful is no longer supported. If
the author does not care to support it on the web, I dont care to
try to pay him for it. Such payment as I make is in the creation of
a set of FREEWARE tools I have developed to make available to the
literary authors, so that they can, as software authors now do, put
their work online in the best manner possible. If their work is of
any value, this will be seen, and they too, can hang it on their
own shingles.
With regard to Microsoft in particular, whatever the decisions of
the court may be in piracy cases, they have not proved to me, that
what was 'stolen' was theirs in the first place. Inasmuch as they
will not publish the source code, I have no way of knowing how much
of it was stolen from the work of others, and given what I have
seen of their methods in other parts of business, I'd expect them
to steal everything they thought they could get away with. The
moral high ground of Microsoft is not even a jungle, it's a swamp.
Their practices have created a lot of enemies. I saw another hit
on the MSN website today. If Microsoft cannot protect computers
which they own from being hacked, what hope can they offer that
they can protect yours??
If you look at ancient history, you see other attempts at monopoly,
all of which eventually failed. You also see other examples of the
open source system, such as the philosophical writings, of which no
author claimed copywrite. The standard practice was for an author to
produce a notable work. They payoff came in the invitations to the
salons of Patrons, and quite often such talent was supported by the
city as well, people being proud to have genius representing them.
The innovations of the Greeks was done entirely without IP rights.
The stagnation of the Chinese was the direct result of the Emperors
trying to control and retain the secrets of their technology in
porcelin, silk, gun powder, et al.
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