Posted by Mikko (193.234.247.51) on May 02, 2002 at 07:45:53:
In Reply to: the real problem posted by isaac (68.63.80.7) on April 30, 2002 at 16:04:38:
: the issue is that when you buy a car or a cd, you buy the rights to the physical object itself. ie, to the material manifestation of the intellectual property, the object itself.
My bass is a good example of that, given the manufacturer's policies. It's made by a company called Ernie Ball Musicman, which is very strict about copyright issues. (More so than Gibson and Fender, for example, whose instruments have been widely copied by other manufacturers -- although many have been sued because of that)
The instrument has a bolt-on maple neck with a maple fingerboard. If I decided that a neck with a rosewood fingerboard would be better, the actual physical operation is relatively simple. I could also buy a neck from the manufacturer, they would send me one.
However, they consider that they have a proprietary right for the neck design. When they sold the bass to it's first owner, they sold the buyer the right to use the instrument, sell to someone else and so forth. They didn't sell the right to start manufacturing similar instruments, and therefore (as they are very strict about this), they want to get the original neck back to the factory before sending the new one. If they didn't get it, there would be a possibility that I'd use the neck in another instrument, in a fake copy, for example.
Of course nothing could stop me from taking the neck off and using it somewhere else, but then I'd have a neckless instrument so it wouldn't make any sense. In the world of CDs, DVDs, computer software and so on, someone making illegal copies doesn't have to deal with a similar problem.