That was an excellent article.
I
LOVED this:
Thomas Jefferson once famously wrote:
Full quote
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
The rest of the article was equally wonderful.
My position on copyright, IP, and patents has shifted rather radically as of late. The utter abuse of them has led me now to the point where I wonder if we would not be better off simply by abolishing them altogether.
Here is a fun fact...
20% of your body -- of YOU -- is OWNED thanks to patents on humans.
I find that repulsive. That is SLAVERY. Owning people is flat out SLAVERY. The patent system that has allowed this is simply broken beyond repair.
Portions of mathematics -- fundamental equations -- have been patented... Again. The patent system is broken beyond repair.
These are fundamental travesties. They are not forgivable. These are the blackest of sins. They are the things of nightmares. And they are very, very real now.
