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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (3316)	4/28/2004 6:32:34 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

After all, property rights are founded above all in the right to one's labor. Thus, if one puts something to use, like clearing and cultivating land, or uses the convertible result of labor (i.e., cash) to pay for something, it belongs to you. If you invent something and I independently invent the same thing, then in both cases it is the product of out labor. If you build a chair that doesn't keep me from building a chair it just means I can't grab your chair. The chair can only have one owner (it could be owned by a group or collective but anyone outside the group doesn't own it) if you have it and I take it then you no longer have it. However if you invent the idea of a chair, and I not knowing of your invention also devise a chair my making and using chairs doesn't deprive you of anything. To encourage people to put the effort in to developing new things the law and historical convention support the idea of a limited period of exclusive control through patents. I support the idea of patents for practical reasons but I don't consider having such a monopoly over a new invention to be a natural right. If I sneak into a movie theater, I am stealing from it. You are at least trespassing and would be even without any copyright or patent laws or even the ideas behind such laws. Along with this goes the idea that we have a natural right to dispose of our property by bequest. I agree with that and with the sentences that follow it but I might consider the property to be so disposed to be the exclusive legal right to produce some patented item or publish some copyrighted work, rather then the ideas behind either. If a patent or copyright holder dies (or for that matter while they are still alive) I think the right should be transferable, but I don't think the right itself should include perpetual control over the ideas. Also I think patents should be rained in a bit. I don't support patents on things like Amazon.Com's "one click buying". I think the requirements for a patent to be "novel, useful, and not obvious" should be held to more strictly and I' skeptical about "business method patents". Searching around the web I found this quote which I think I agree with - "infringement of copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion or fraud... The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially liken infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion or fraud." - Harry Blackmun in USSC decision. Tim