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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (43781)	6/11/2001 4:00:40 AM
From: Neil Booth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

You assume he has a right to compensation. Why? The only reason he does is a by-product of copyright law, whose reason for existence is explicitly not to compensate the producer, but to provide more for the public (look at your US Supreme Court judgements / Constitution if you don't believe me). Copyright law came into existence in the days of the printing press to stop publishers copying the work of other publishers, not to prevent a little guy copying something. How would you feel if Newton wanted royalties for anyone who used anything based on gravity? Or someone who developed a mathematical theorem could claim royalties for anyone using it? It's equally silly to deny people a copy of something digital when there is an infinite supply of them. Most of the world suffers from a shortage of material things like food; it seems immoral to introduce an artifical shortage where one does not exist. Information, and digital information, is not the same as property, though the big corps want you to think it is. The only reason people equate them is that they've been brainwashed by marketing terms like "intellectual property" and "IP rights". And no, I don't think AMD boasting about the number of patents it got this year is a particularly good thing, even though I'm a (large) shareholder. The biggest problem with "IP" laws, particularly in the U.S., is they serve to discourage, not encourage, competition and openness. They shut out the little company with a good idea, which doesn't have a patent portfolio of 1000's, since it is threatened with endless legal action, often of dubious merit, by bigger companies which do. Look at RMBS. I also think there is a lot of underlying protectionism involved, from e.g. programmers in the "rich first world" afraid of losing their high salaries to competition from equally good programmers from India. Neil.