Re: Social Contract
On Friday 28 April 2006 08:34 pm, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 'll respond to the very last sentence first. I don't know. But
> you might ask Benjamin Franklin, because he put everything he
> did into the Public Domain, and lobbied hard to have neither
> Copyright nor Patent Law in the USA. He lost his battle, so
> he put everything into the Public Domain.
I didn't know this about old Ben. He sounds very much like a pure socialist
and that's very surprising -- and very much like Richard Stallman since
without copyrights and patents there's no protection for intellectual
property. I wonder what Ben thought about how an author or inventor would
survive in a free market economy. Just the other day I was watching a Senate
hearing where a songwriter was saying she could not make a living without the
copyright and IPR laws. And I've wondered a long time about how the economy
might have to change if there were no IPR. The idea has appeal in so many
ways, then you run smack into the wall of monetary incentives.
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