A note about intellectual property
March 9, 2010
The concept of owning ideas is slightly problematic in a sense, since anyone who has a working brain can “have” the exact same idea you are having, while matter replicators are needed to have someone’s physical property without using force. Now, I ask: how can someone protect her intellectual property, then? She could always keep her idea in her head forever, out of the reach of anyone; if she wants to take full advantage of her idea, though, she has to risk being accused by anyone else of copying your idea from another, a plausible problem, given the number of nominally thinking sapients in this tiny insignificant blue planet. The only for her to safeguard her idea from being “misappropriated” by other humans while also being able to use her ideas for monetary gain is o invite the involvement of the state, through restricting intellectual commerce (via copyright, patent, trademark, and others.) So it is an affront to my just-pretending-to-be-Objectivist-while-in-fact-I-am-a-socialist-capitalist philosophy that there are business groups that proclaim their inherent “Capitalist” right to own ideas while they ask the government to intervene for them. That makes me hate the whole of humanity more (though not as much as the time when I read about that Arroyo is like Marcos: some people will hate her now, but eventually everybody will love her due to her accomplishments in infrastructure, education, the economy, etcetera, etcetera, etcete-fleming-ra). The saddest thing is, their plans have horribly gone RIGHT. In fact, I am very fortunate that I live in a country where I cannot be arrested for playing MP#s using my Ubuntu Linux computer (the MP3 codec is patented, and it is only in the Philippines, India, and some other nations where software patents are invalid). Screw Disney, for leading the charge to screw us with the law every time its incredibly lame (until this September, that is) everyman cartoon character is past its copyright date. Screw Microsoft, for daring to use its patent portfolio to bribe Linux-using companies under the pretense of Linux having broken one of its patents, in the same way that a gangster would say:
“Nice store you’ve got there; pity if it would get burned down, though.”
Now they’re just playing with us.
Word count: 373
