On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 04:42:28PM +0300, Richard Braakman wrote: > On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 10:39:02PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > I thought basically every place outside the U.S. was like that. Several > > times when the U.S. Supreme Court decision of _Feist v. Rural Telephone > > Service Co._ has come up, it's been ridiculed by some Europeans. > > Can you substantiate that? I don't remember any such ridicule. I'm pretty sure I'm remembering the word lists argument. Looking for posts to this list with "aspell" in the subject line might turn it up. If I recall correctly, U.S. legal tradition was ridiculed for not being grounded on "sweat-of-the-brow" arguments. In actual fact, very little "IP law" in the U.S. appears to be grounded on that. It's not generally relevant to either copyright or patent law in the U.S. I guess it sort of applies to trademark law, where commercial interests face a "use it or lose it" situation. However, they don't have to "sweat" much to get awarded a trademark in the first place, so maybe it fails there too. I suspect that "sweat-of-the-brow" principles actually discourage the cultivation of an intellectual commons rather than reinforcing one. That isn't to say I find the U.S. system preferable. No place in the world appears to be a terribly good environment for intellectual communitarianism. -- G. Branden Robinson | The power of accurate observation Debian GNU/Linux | is frequently called cynicism by branden@debian.org | those who don't have it. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- George Bernard Shaw
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