From: seanmcd@ac.dal.ca
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Why the Piracy? Here's why...
Date: 12 Jan 93 01:59:05 GMT
Organization: Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

In article <1is9edINN9s8@life.ai.mit.edu>, mycroft@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) writes:
> 
> In article <1993Jan10.114839.10045@ac.dal.ca> seanmcd@ac.dal.ca writes:
>>
>> I hope that you produce something like a piece of software some day
>> and then get killed by pirates; we'll see how utopian you are then.
> 
> I believe you missed something.  If it weren't for trade secrets,
> patents, and copyrights, writing software would be trivial; if I needed
> a fast algorithm for blitting on a Mac, for example, I'd just look it
> up.
> 
> It is the very fact that we `protect' such information that causes it
> to become so valuable; everyone has to invest the time to reinvent it.
> 
> -- 
>  \  /   Charles Hannum, mycroft@ai.mit.edu
>  /\ \   PGP public key available on request.  MIME, AMS, NextMail accepted.
> Scheme  White heterosexual atheist male (WHAM) pride!

Well, what you missed was my argument that you would probably have neither
a computer, nor an operating system, nor a development platform to work
on to do such programming as you wished to.

I probably shouldn't have confronted the original issue (Freek's posting)
so seriously, since I think he was more or less, as he states, indulging
in an exercise of 'wishful thinking'. The reactions to this wishful thinking
have seemed to attack the apparent presupposition that, if there were no
'intellectual property laws' that everything else would remain intact. In
fact, intellectual property laws, as one poster astutely pointed out, have in
fact led to the increased production and dissemination of knowledge, as 
paradoxical as that might seem.

We cannot take intellectual property laws to be discrete addendums onto an
independent system. Intellectual property laws undergrid out current post-
industrial society where information has been commodotized and has become
a medium of exchange, much as labour used to be (and still is). If we seriously
wish to hypothesize about a society where information is for all intents &
purposes 'free', then we must reconstruct what society would look like with
such conditions of development; it would most assuredly not look like the
society we have today.

Laws to protect information, or intellectual property, developed due to the
onset of technology which allowed for the rapid duplication, exchange and
transmission of types of knowledge: the printing press; the telegraph;
advanced forms of transportation, etc. For example, Shakespeare had many
rip-offs of his plays produced, some of poor quality made by actors who 
remembered as much of the plays as they could and copied them down as 'the
true works of wm shakespeare', others that were quite good. But in those
days, i.e., around 1600, authors did not hold a copyright in their works as
we understand it. Instead, they could sell the rights to their works to
printers who then owned the work and could do with it as they pleased. My
point is that intellectual property laws did not develop out of a malicious
attempt to forbid others access to knowledge, but rather out of necessity in
response to technologcial changes that made the creator of such works lose the
value of the creation. Of course, these laws also developed in a certain 
historical context (with relevant social, religious, econocmic and other
aspects) which cannot be divorced from an understanding of why such laws came
into being.

In sum, I am not against ideological musings on what it would be like to live
in a society without intellectual property laws, but many other interrelated
aspects would have to be reevaluated before we could get a good picture of
what such an existence would be like. We can't simply remove 'intellectual
property laws' from our soceity and expect the rest to remain.

Nietzsche has something relevant to say here: "I know the pleasure in
destroying to a degree that accords with my powers to destroy -- in both
respects I obey my Dionysian nature which does not know how to separate doing
No from saying Yes." --it's not enough to just say 'no' to intellectual
property laws; you've got to create as you destroy, and revision what soceity
would look like.

Anyways...back to programming! Yes, I program the Mac! :)

^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^
Sean McDowell                    "I am the first immoralist:
Dalhousie University Law School   that makes me the annihilator
seanmcd@ac.dal.ca                 par excellence" - Nietzsche
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer