On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 02:48:04AM -0600, J.B. Nicholson-Owens wrote: > Thanks for the thoughtful essay. Since you're "pulling an RMS" you might > reconsider using the term "intellectual property" in the context of > combining disparate areas of law (like patents and copyrights). You could > have said "modern discussions of copyright law" above, for example. But > this is not to take away from an interesting read. I'm familiar with the essay and am in sympathy with much that RMS has to say about the term "intellectual property". I used it because the scope and thrust of my arguments were such that it didn't seem rhetorically economical to digress on the legitimacy of this admittedly popular term. Your point is well taken, however, and a good way to reinforce the transition I am advocating to get about the business of divorcing the concept of "property" from intangible, nonscarce, intellectual output. For even if I were to be persuasive in the argument at hand, I think only an unstable equilibrium could be achieved, and meritless notions of "property" would soon distort people's thinking back in the direction of the current oppressive implementation of copyright. -- G. Branden Robinson | The software said it required Debian GNU/Linux | Windows 3.1 or better, so I branden@debian.org | installed Linux. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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