Very lucid argument in the portion I have snipped, but there are a few things I will take exception in the introduction.
On Thu, Mar 17, 2005 at 06:56:26AM +0000, Greg Igaya wrote: > It's fairly obvious why intellectual property should be protected. > Without such legal systems in place, there are no monetary incentives > for would-be IP creators (software developers, musicians, writers) to > do any work or to develop anything new. This is, of course, not true. Copyright didn't exist in the days of Mozart and Shakespeare, and yet today's authors, who supposedly have all of the "benefits" of copyright, have yet to surpass them. There was monetary incentive for Shakespeare even though his plays weren't copyrighted: people paid to see them performed, just as people will pay to watch concerts today. There was monetary incentive for Mozart and the other great composers of his time: they had wealthy patrons who paid them to write their music. Companies like Red Hat develop Free/Open Source Software as part of their core business. Developing under an open source license essentially eschews any monetary benefit that may come from copyright, because open source licenses remove the propertarian restrictions that copyright gives. And yet Red Hat is a profitable company. No, there are other ways to make money off creations than leaning on government-granted monopolies, to those who have imagination. However, given the proper perspective, it is true that copyrights and patents would provide some measure of benefit, but this is a much more delicate balancing act than the corporate sponsors of the dystopian world we live in would have us think. Simply increasing the propertarian control copyright grants over ever longer periods of time has a negative, rather than positive effect on human creativity, because much human creativity depends on the works of others. For instance, nearly half of all the animated movies created by the Walt Disney Company to date have their ultimate origin in some public domain story (Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Treasure Planet, Tarzan, and so forth). Their sponsorship of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act may well be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. For patents the situation is even more delicate, because of the radical differences between the various industries over which it is now deemed applicable. > As we (still) live in a predominantly capitalist society, removing > these incentives would stifle artistic and technological development. How stifled was artistic development in the time of Shakespeare? In fact, it might even be argued that the *lack of copyright* in his time was what *enabled* Shakespeare to be as great as he became. Nearly all of his plays are, like Disney Animated Features, based on other stories that he did not create himself. Was Shakespeare a ripoff? Only if you would consider The Little Mermaid a ripoff of Hans Christian Andersen or The Lion King a ripoff of Hamlet... Also, you haven't taken into account the simple fact that it is basic human nature to create. As a species we've probably been telling stories and singing songs to each other for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. The idea that it will all come to an end just because people can't get paid to do it is ludicrous. It had been going on since before there was money, before there was even a concept of property, and it will go on while the human race endures. -- Debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. http://stormwyrm.blogspot.com/ -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
