Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!wuarchive!uunet!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: trial.misc.legal.software
Subject: Re: Intellectual Property
Message-ID: <1990Aug15.031142.372@looking.on.ca>
Date: 15 Aug 90 03:11:42 GMT
References: <80565@aerospace.AERO.ORG> <1990Aug10.043721.2081@looking.on.ca> <80636@aerospace.AERO.ORG> <1990Aug11.040632.21692@looking.on.ca> <80817@aerospace.AERO.ORG> <1990Aug14.172413.10447@looking.on.ca> <80981@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 23

In article <80981@aerospace.AERO.ORG> abbott@antares.UUCP (Russell J. Abbott) writes:
>To summarize, I agree that labor and creation typically increase the
>wealth of the person performing them.  I suppose that is the work ethic
>that we have all grown up to revere.

But what is "wealth" (non-spiritual) but the ownership of property?
To say that wealth is created through labour and creativity is to say that
property dervives from these things.

Indeed creative work, as I said in a previous posting, is the most
valuable thing there is in the world.  Some forms of creative work you
can easily guarantee you'll get paid for -- others you can't because there
is either no protection or people simply ignore the protective laws (piracy).

But this is a matter of law, not of defining philosophy.

I have yet to see any other suggestions about sources of property other
than creation, other than the Utilitarian ("We have the concept of
property because we benefit as a group from it.")   That latter definition
would be fine if we were all Utilitarians, but we are not, nor, it seems, do
people wish that ethic to be the basis of law.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473