On Fri, 2007-12-28 at 19:35 +0530, shiv sastry wrote: > > hmm..... your assertion that Hindus have always shared knowledge > > without a fee seems to go against my perception of the concept of > > "gurudakshina" > Fair enough. You are right. There is obviously something I am missing.
as the post about "gurudakshina" notes, traditions of supposedly free knowledge were not necessarily so. indeed, there's nothing particularly indian about them. it is easy to equate "modern" with "western", but most societies had systems of sharing knowledge that did not involve concepts of per-item payment, such as royalties. instead, such knowledge "sharing" was funded through other means, such as patronage, which has problems of its own. worse, as the eklavya story highlights, most "traditional" approaches to knowledge including in the west placed a far higher emphasis on _not sharing_ and keeping knowledge secret than is generally depicted in romantic descriptions of our cultures. in medieval europe, there were the guilds, which limited the distribution of knowledge to members as much as possible. in india, the famous "guru-shishya" tradition made it taboo to share "valuable" information except between a master and his pupil. of course, the pupil paid for this knowledge in many ways and the control over this valuable information was useful for the master to extract revenue from this knowledge, typically in terms of patronage. this model f secrecy and control of knowledge transmission should be apparent to anyone who's familiar with how indian music, say, is taught today, especially among the most traditional people. one of the main purposes and innovations of the modern IPR system is to _increase_ knowledge sharing, but providing state guarantees of control and revenue through an exclusive right such as a patent or copyright. you need such artificial state-guaranteed rights only if you want to share your knowledge beyond limited channels (such as within a guild, your students, your company) you can control (through social pressure, cultural norms and/or legal protections such as guild rules or trade secret law). while i'd be the first to acknowledge the excesses of the IPR system, non-IPR systems were hardly ideal or even as "open" as sometimes depicted. and IPR itself is portrayed so stupidly by many of its opponents. patents and copyright have term limits extending to a few decades. so talking of charging royalties for the zero, egyptian pyramids or even rice developed by indian farmers over millenia doesn't in any way provide counter arguments for, say, 20-year patents on new forms of rice, and just makes IPR critics look ignorant and silly. there are enough real flaws with and abuses of IPR to criticise. -rishab
