Posted by isaac (149.152.188.55) on April 30, 2002 at 13:01:01:
In Reply to: A question for Isaac, Matches and everybody who's interested posted by diarm (194.125.207.223) on April 30, 2002 at 12:39:18:
: What if all the laws protecting intellectual property (patents, copyright) were scrapped?
that'd be horrible!
: What do you see happening to the economy? To firms that invent and produce stuff?
why would there be firms that invent stuff? if you can't patent anything, you can't make money by inventing new stuff. inventors will find other jobs. inventors in training (including loads of students like me) will persue other lines of study.
not to mention musicians, writers, and all other artists. say goodbye to art as you know it, if intellectual property rights are stripped.
that being said, i dont' think that kazaa and morpheus and the other napster-clones pose any real threat. i believe that an artist should be able to prohibit his work from being shared if he doesn't want it to be, and i don't download metallica primarily out of respect for their wishes, even tho it IS essentially an unenforcable law. however, the musicians that have pushed FOR the sharing of their music have reaped the benefits of increased album sales and publicity.
most of the arguments for freeing intellectual property have a huge glaring problem with them. if artists and inventors aren't being paid for the right to their intellectual property, they say, then "programmers will program for the love of programming." that's bullshit. a person with a masters degree in computer science may very well love programming. however, he's a man with a mouth and a belly, and has to get food. if he's busy mopping the floor at the 7-11 all day to pay the rent, he's not going to produce any great software. even on the extremely flawed ethical system by which anti-intellectual-property-rights people generally use (utilitarianism) this has big problems. of course, on any rational ethical system, it amounts to theivery.
isaac