Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
As I said before, an "idea" is not intellectual property, and is not protected. An idea of a building is not a building; an idea of a picture is not a painting; an idea of a story is not a book. It's only when those ideas take concrete form - in the shape of the building, the painting, or the book, that they become something that is "protectable".
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The building and the painting seem to be spurious arguments to me. Clearly these are physical things and ownership falls under physical ownership rights. The idea behind them is important, but it's their physical manifestation that is protected.
Now let's say that I came up with a cool idea to build a house that made it bigger on the inside than on the outside (kind of a Tardis house). That would be something that I would use IP laws to protect. The idea. Not the house after I built it, but against the happening of someone visiting my house and going, "Oh! That's how he does it", and making and selling his own houses bigger on the inside than the outside.
IP is most definitely about ideas. And it's about protecting the ability to profit from those ideas.
I'll go out on a limb here. I'd say that most people are happy with the idea of using laws to prevent someone from using somebody else's idea and making profit from it to the detriment of the person that had the original idea. That's what the GNU and Creative Commons license stuff is all about - "Hey! Take this. Have fun with this. Use this. Enjoy this. But don't try to sell this."