>>: Francois-Rene Rideau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>: Sourav K. Mandal
>> Bill Gates is not an anomaly, at least, not in the way you think.
>> The tyrant persecutes him, but the tyrant also raised him to begin with;
>> it's really a story of the tyrant giving then taking away according to
>> his whims; a story of the arbitrary, of the lack of Rule of Law.
>
> Um, when was he raised by the "tyrant?"
The day he had his first copyright or patent to enforce;
every time he could threaten to sue anyone
for intellectual property infringement,
which is the main source of his monopoly,
and of related revenues.
> Bill Gates [...] certainly never received any direct support from
> the government, and if you mean copyright protection,
Yes he did, indeed in the form of "intellectual property" protectionism.
> then nearly every author ever is a similar Frankenstein monster.
Why "Frankenstein monster"?
Are the poor monsters because they receive relief?
Are the rich monsters because they can evade taxes by various tricks?
Are negros monsters because there are "positive" discrimation laws?
Are non-smokers monsters because there are laws against smoking?
No. When an injustice is done, neither the victim nor the beneficiary
of the loot are responsible. Only the one who enforces the injustice is.
Victims and beneficiaries shall receive neither glory nor shame;
they are no greater and no lesser for what is done to them.
They can only rise or fall for what they do or fail to do.
The ones that are responsible, the ones that should be punished,
are the ones who do; those who perform the injustice; those who promote it;
those who are concerned and who hold influence, yet fail to fight injustice;
those who glorify it, and make nice theories about evil being good.
When government grants privileges, it corrupts those who accept them,
and discriminates against those who refuse them.
Bill Gates is a most corrupt businessman:
he learnt to make the most out of government-granted privileges;
in this respect, he is but a despicable looter;
now law's attributions doesn't include fighting immorality.
The most guilty people in this case are the government people
who organize the racket to begin with. In that respect,
Bill Gates has his own fair share of responsibility, since he uses
copious funds to lobby government into continuing and extending the racket.
But even his share is tiny in comparison to that of evil politicians,
lawyers, journalists, publishers, film-makers, etc, who have
a much more direct responsibility in the whole IP racket.
> This is what is confounding about Bill Gates.
> He has achieved so much by his own hand,
He has achieved NOTHING by his own hand.
Technically, he produced crap from beginning to end,
and even this crap was often bought from other companies
(often so as to prevent them from becoming better and competing with him).
His whole achievement resides in milking a government-granted monopoly
while riding the wave of a technically inferior hardware architecture
whose success was precisely due to its (relative) lack of protectionist
barriers (because, to the contrary of all other desktop computer platforms,
the IBM PC was the only one whose manufacturing the maker had failed to lock
with patents and copyrights).
> yet is a proponent of gov't policies that
> abrogate the rights of those like him in future generations.
He is a proponent of government's power to grant him a monopoly.
He is ready to follow the whims of a tyrannical government,
as long as there remains big enough a loot for him to seize.
> Exclusive patents are stupid, and I think they should be abolished
> to make way for concurrent patents, "public good" be damned.
"concurrent patent" is an oxymoron.
The very principle of a patent is a government-granted monopoly.
A patent with compulsory licensing would still be robbery of those
forced to purchase licenses (with a rate set by who knows which
politician robbers). Every single unearned penny is unearned.
> Concurrent patents can be support by the same line of reasoning as
> copyrights -- IP is indeed property, owned by the creator. I could
> get into it here, but I am afraid we are veering sharply off-topic
> ...
Copyrights cannot be supported, but by sheer force.
Check your facts: "intellectual property" is not property, but robbery.
Just like "collective liberty" is not liberty, but oppression.
Just like "social justice" is not justice, but injustice.
I don't think this is off-topic (but then, I'm no moderator on this list).
PS: would any of you have access to these discussions by G. de Molinari
about intellectual property? I think there's interesting stuff in
"Les Soirées de la rue St Lazare", but they are quite difficult to find...
As for the material I have about Free Information
vs Information Protectionism, read the articles down:
http://fare.tunes.org/libre-logiciel.html#Ou
(If you know of material I omitted, please tell me about it.)
Yours freely,
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion
that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a
number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of
guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing
circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not
supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have
any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or
turned back, for their private benefit. That is all.
-- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
