Re: [OS:N:] Does "Intellectual Property" beg the question?

Thank you Paul. That was a very well thought out and well written post.

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> 
> Richard Stallman essentially makes the point that the phrase 
> "Intellectual Property" is a marketing term to beg the question of how 
> patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and a few other things 
> should be treated. If you use that term, then it is unfortunately a 
> no-brainer to assume "Intellectual Property" should be treated as 
> property as opposed to something else. The cause of freedom is generally 
> not served by using that term to discuss seperate items which are 
> treated seperately by the law. See:
>   http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
> 
> It would be more accurate to call them "intellectual monopolies".
> 
> People who promote a term like "Intellectual Property" (as opposed to 
> the rest of us who often throw around such a term to try to sound 
> sophisticated and knowledgeable, and I was guilty of using it that way 
> for a while myself) often try to rig the political landscape of laws to 
> work in their favor through political influence that has little to do 
> with "promoting the general welfare...".
> 
> For example if patents, trademarks, trade secrets, trademarks, etc. were 
> really like "real estate" why are they not taxed annually based on a 
> self-assessed public domain buyout value?
>   http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=889
> Clearly patents, trademarks, etc. impose a burden on society like real 
> property as they are monopolies which cost society money to enforce 
> (police, prisons, judiciary, chilling effects, judiciary, registration, 
> record keeping, etc.) yet rightholders do not have to directly pay most 
> of these costs which their monopolies create for society. And now that 
> copyrights no longer go into the public domain in practice, the part of 
> the bargain for copyrights that said copyrighted material entering the 
> public domain somehow justified this process is now completely broken in 
> the US.
> 
> In general, somewhat similar sorts of advertising spins were made by 
> slave holders to argue their "fundamental human right" to hold property 
> (i.e. keep and breed human slaves like livestock, including sometimes 
> their own children) were in danger of being violated by talk of 
> abolition of slavery. Sadly, many US citizens, including some blacks, 
> supported slavery as a concept in hopes they too would become slave 
> holders (in general, only a small minority of relatively wealthy US 
> citizens in the 1800s actually owned slaves).
>   http://www.issues-views.com/index.php/sect/23000/article/23018
> 
> While obviously the human suffering by both slaves and slaveholders (who 
> were turned themselves into beasts by the practice) is not equivalent to 
> what goes on under copyright, there are parallels. For example, millions 
> of people in Africa are dying annually of curable diseases because of 
> drug patents making drugs inaccessible financially. Common medical 
> problems worldwide (malaria, river blindness) are not being addressed 
> significantly by drug researchers who focus mainly on "me too" clones of 
> financially succesful drugs (e.g. the next Viagra). We spend time 
> discussing this issue instead of creating more free content and more 
> free software.
> 
> I think it is a fair question (though maybe offtopic for this list) to 
> talk about patents, copyrights, trademarks etc. and the fundamental 
> human rights of both rightsholders to earn a return on investment and 
> and licensed property users for fair use, but only as long as we then 
> also discuss the whole picture related to "intellectual monopolies":
> * billions of people in poverty,
> * the widening gap between rich and poor,
> * the failure of the computer industry to spread innovative concepts 
> rapidly (e.g. Memex (1940s), Smalltalk (1970s), IBM's VM (1960s), or QNX 
> (early 1980s), which only now decades later have become widespread in 
> somewhat crippled forms in HTML and the Web, Java and Windows, the 
> Common Language Runtime, and [ducks, even though I use it preferrably] 
> GNU/Linux).
> * the potential impending imprisonment of millions of US citizens for 
> copyright violations based on laws passed in the last few years and 
> related stress on society even now,
> * the chilling effects of works not produced or time wasted determing 
> who owns the rights to something for creation of a derivative work, etc.
> 
> --Paul Fernhout
> 
> This email is placed into the public domain (except where noted, e.g. 
> inclusions that are presumed fair use). Note however that law and morals 
> related to identity theft, slander, etc. means you can't say you wrote 
> it or alter it in such a way as to indicate I wrote the altered version.


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