Verily I say unto thee, that Phil Da Lick! spake thusly:
> Hadron wrote:
>> "All of this fear is from people who have guilty knowledge of their
>> own actions..."
Just the kind of FUD I'd expect from a Patent Troll.
I suppose he has to try to justify his racketeering somehow.
> Every invention is built on top of others that preceded it.
Yes, this is the essence of why ideas cannot be real property.
If I single-handedly build something tangible from my own materials,
then there is no question that the physical fruit of my labour is
uniquely my work, and I should have the right to claim ownership of that
distinct object, and subsequently sell it. And the buyer should then be
equally entitled to claim ownership, since that property has been
completely transferred, and no two physical objects can exist in more
than one place at one time (quantum mechanics theorem notwithstanding).
Of course distinct objects can be owned by more than one person
(partners), but "Intellectual Property" is not about distinct objects,
much less "partnerships", it's about granting "permission" to utilise
something ethereal that has been wrongfully claimed as "property".
If I do a day's work, I am providing labour (a service) which I can
naturally claim as my own, since it is me providing it (there is only
one of me, and I am actually doing the work), and therefore I should be
entitled to claim remuneration (*once*, not in perpetuity) for the
actual work I do, at the time I do it, if so required.
But when it comes to ideas, no one can say with absolute certainty that
any idea is unique, nor where it originated, since it is quite possible
that an idea may well have been considered elsewhere by someone else but
never published. To claim "ownership" of an idea is therefore morally
wrong, and frankly nonsense. And even if by some miracle it could be
incontestably proved that an idea was truly original and unique (as
opposed to simply being *publish* first) then claiming "ownership" is
*still* morally wrong, for the same reason that it would be wrong to
claim "ownership" of a newly discovered aquatic species, simply because
one had observed it. Building things and providing labour is one thing,
but claiming "ownership" of the fundamental building-blocks of existence
is little more than theft, and utterly antithetical to academic
principles. Justifying this theft in the name of supposed financial
"need" to cover research costs, is just an excuse masking greed or
incompetence. The "need" may be there, but the "right" certainly isn't.
Selling an "idea" is little more than renting out a facsimile copy of
what you cannot even guarantee is uniquely yours to sell. The fact that
patent offices facilitate this immoral practise doesn't justify it, IMO.
I don't care about the practical implications one iota. I'd rather that
mankind still lived in caves and hunted wildebeest with spears, than
behaved like gangsters running racketeering operations based on trading
the human soul. Not that it'd ever come to that, of course, since trade
thrived for millennia without such depraved practises, and could easily
continue to do so.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player,
| That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
| And then is heard no more. It is a tale
| Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
| Signifying nothing." ~ Shakespeare
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
17:21:31 up 38 days, 14:34, 5 users, load average: 0.85, 1.14, 0.94
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