Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Jefferson is talking about "ideas". A book is not an "idea", any more than a house is an "idea". One can indeed have ideas about both the storyline of a book and building a house, but both only come into existance when you give them a physical manifestation - write the book, or build the house. Its the physical manifestation which gets the protection, not the idea.
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That's not quite correct. The
restriction (copyright is about
restriction, not about
protection) does not apply to the physical object, but to the contents. You can violate the copyright of a book without even coming in contact with the physical object, e.g. by writing down what your friend reads aloud from the book.
Also consider what an e-book is. It can be a certain arrangement of electrons in some computer memory. None of the physical objects involved are under the copying restriction, just the meaning of the (perhaps constantly fluctuating and/or re-established) pattern of electrons.
Now let's get back to the Jefferson quote. What he describes is immaterial copyable entities, which is what the idea of
"an idea" is an abstraction of. E.g., "he who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine" obviously works with whatever can be copied without modifying the original, especially things that can be copied easily. The same goes for the rest of the quote.