Patent and trademark law were formulated to make some sense of this muddle, but the frenetic pace of computerization has only accelerated the confusion. The questions new technologies pose, are as much philosophical and ethical as they are legal. They believe that if I download an MP3, I am stealing because I did not pay to listen to the song. This means that the record company is not receiving income for producing the song, and the artist is not receiving payment for singing it. It never enters their calculations that I might never have listened to the song at all had it not been for the MP3.
Most software companies treat software in the same way.
But then there are people who take ownership in the second sense, that of kinship. The next ten years will see computers become invisible. Computers will be embedded in our houses and cars, in our clothes and shoes. They will be in our furniture and our entertainment devices. They will be in our streets and buildings, our ships and planes.