This started out as a reply post on Eric Raymond’s excellent blog – Armed and Dangerous – but it turned into a long enough rant that I felt it should probably be posted on this blog as well. :-) * * * The U.S. Constitution reads “To promote the PROGRESS of science and useful arts, [...]
In the past few posts I have been discussing current intellectual property law – how its enforcement is actually nothing more than a government enforced monopoly on the reproduction of patterns, and how this distortion of the free market causes a great deal of economic harm. I have also discussed the true free market value [...]
In a previous post, entitled “Pattern Monopoly,” I talked about how our current system of Intellectual Property is actually a distortion of the free market that degrades the useful concept of property rights. At the end of that article I mentioned the concept of “Plagiarism,” mentioning that it is often erroneously (and perhaps sometimes deliberately) [...]
The whole concept of intellectual property is based on having the government enforce monopoly rights over the distribution of certain patterns of information. Anytime you can freely copy existing information that people find valuable, the value created in the market is always greater than the situation in which the government supports a monopoly on the [...]
The other day a friend forwarded me an article about Intellectual Property by Kevin Kelly that seemed very familiar to me: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php I only just recently figured out why it seemed so familiar when I came across a .pdf copy of Paul’s excellent book “A Lodging of Wayfaring Men” that was being distributed freely online, [...]