M. Fioretti wrote:
I can accept a copyright-style protection for your actual work.
Stallman teaches us that copyright and patents are deeply different
beasts, so we shouldn't mix them, but, in the interest of a
stimulating and friendly discussion, I'll byte.
Yes, indeed. I should have written the above more carefully.
I believe your position is best shown in this example:
But if I had finished yesterday, after years of labor, the formula for
the film you used, maybe spending a lot of money, you copied the
formula today and, without even really understanding it, began to sell
tomorrow films at a cheaper price because you have no R&D costs to
recover, I'd be mightily pissed. That's why patents were invented.
Now, I'm going to say something very radical: I disagree.
"What? Is Daniel crazy? Did he just say not to reward hard work?"
I'm not crazy yet :-) and I do see where you're comming from. But I
think I have an interesting, and outside-the-box thought here:
What you just described could be called a "big bang" development model.
That is, an inventor works in secrecy for a long time, and one day
announces to the world this one massive invention. I believe that this
development model should be discouraged in favour of the "small step"
model. Similar to the FOSS mantra "release early, and release often".
The scientific community has been following it for a long time. And
historically, most breakthroughs come from this model.
A useful historical analogy is alchemy vs chemistry. Alchemy was
developed in the big-bang model. People worked in isolation for long
periods of time. During alchemy, very few advances were made. It wasn't
until people started sharing ideas early and often that real progress
was made. Once this happened, progress was very rapid, and gave rise to
what we now call chemistry.
Patents discourage small-step development in favour of the less
productive big-bang development.
Cheers,
Daniel.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
