Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: New Communicational Morality
Keywords: software, copyright, society
Message-ID: <3103@looking.UUCP>
Date: 18 Apr 89 03:04:02 GMT
References: <754@infovax.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de> <3687@ficc.uu.net> <1672@orion.cf.uci.edu> <1038@afit-ab.arpa> <29140@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Distribution: na
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 26

In article <29140@apple.Apple.COM> desnoyer@Apple.COM (Peter Desnoyers) writes:
>What people may be forgetting here is that intellectual property is
>"created" by the legal system. Without laws governing intellectual
>property, it is worth little to nothing.*

You have it exactly wrong.  Intellectual property is created by people.
It is protected by the legal system.  It is material property, like land
and ore that is created by the legal system, since it was not created by
people.

Tell the owners of the formula for Coca-Cola that IP is worth nothing
without the law.  Tell AT&T, the owners of Unix.  Both of these highly
valuable pieces of IP are not protected by any form of intellectual
property law.  (Other than trademark and binary copyrights and the setuid
patent.  The source code to Unix is still unprotected)

In fact, I would argue that what makes most material property "property"
is the IP that is within it.  A car and a lump of impure iron are the same
piece of matter.  What makes the car 'property' is the creative work that
went into arranging the lump of iron.

Intellectual property is the only true form of property there is.  It is
the only once that exists outside the law.  There is nothing that is more
truly *yours* than the creations of your own mind.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473