Re: FW: Windows Live and Privacy

[Drsolly <drsollyp () drsolly com>]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Bruce Ediger wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Brian Loe wrote:
>
> > Without intellectual property rights what would our world look like
> > right now? Even the opensource community has copyrights... (or do they
> > call them copylefts?)
>
> Think "USA before 1909": http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html
> This period arguably constituted the period of the most rapid technological
> change in the USA's history.  I don't doubt a correlation.
>
> Before 1909, the USA did not respect copyrights registered in other countries.
>
> Yes, the USA, My Country, was an IP outlaw, like Singapore and Taiwan today.
>
> Some academic research exists to support this sort of system:
> http://minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr357.pdf
>
> Boldrin and Levine have published other papers on the subject.
>
> Some philosophical objections to copyright also exist:
> http://libertariannation.org/a/f31l1.html
>
> I doubt those will make much impression on you.  The way you phrase your
> question seems to indicate that you believe that "IP rights" should exist
> to protect the ideas that you and/or other people come up with.  That's
> a false basis for reasoning from, at least in terms of copyright law.
> The basis of copyright law is to get people to disclose ideas by giving
> them a short period of state-enforced monopoly, during which the inventor
> can extract monopoly rents.
>
> That's a whole lot different than the concept of intellectual *property*.
> Ideas and concepts basically aren't "property" in the sense that a car
> or a house or a factory building are property.  Your car can be stolen,
> depriving you of the use of it.  However, if someone copies my ideas about
> writing a checker-playing program, neither I nor my program are deprived of
> the use of those ideas.
 
I'd just like to point out that ideas aren't copyrightable. 

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