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. -- Bruce Ediger 720-932-1954 [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.