[axel77]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Considering most of the men who developed the ideas of patent and copyright were believers in God, it's clear they simply ignored the fallacy you present (assuming they actually considered it) because of the nature of commerce, which owes no allegiances to religion. In other words, they were more concerned with the encouragement of ideas than with their egalitarianism, which they perceived as being counter-productive to commerce.

Well the nature of commerce does owe quite some allegiances to religion. At least the creation of its nature. To show this was the point of the life work of Max Weber. Our commerce developed out of the protestant ethics. Its no surprise that it was england, the protestant country, that started with a big winnig margin (almost 100 years) with the industrial revolution and it was the catholic countries that hinged behind most. Catholic ethics was: Who is poor and renunciative in this life, will have a good position in the afterlife. Protestant ethics on the other hand: who is in the favor of god (and thus have a good position in the afterlife), will have him showing this publicly already in this life. And so developing wealth was at first a religious act, the protestants didn't want you to stop working, when you think you had enough (that was evil), however if you continued to work, and its successfull, you are going to have real good place in the afterlife. Oe can see how this behaves just like the business mentality we know today. Somewhere along the way this got robbed its religious content. And as in the beginning this mentality was a free religious decision of its supporters to life their life that way, we are today more or less forced by society to do so, without any spiritual content. Thats famous "iron cage" Weber pointed at.

Of course, even those who believe in human (or Divine) inspiration also have to consider that the human-invented Scientific Method is also responsible for many "ideas," but arrived at in a more engineered sense. Edison's New Jersey facility is a textbook example of the process of starting with a desired result, experimenting thoroughly, developing provable conclusions, and refining until the desired result is reached... the famous "10% inspiration, 90% perspiration" that defined 19th and 20th Century innovation.

I totally agree, for me is "thinking is handcraft", okay you sometimes have suprising ideas, that seem to come out of the nowhere, but as everyone will tell you, you need to systimatically induldge into a topic, to come out with a result. The human as "meat processor" Thats however the oppinion to the source of ideas that got contested and I felt to want to defend with a big wall of text.

The "ideas" that came from such sources were more easily assigned ownership, simply because the first person/group to be able to demonstrate an idea was awarded ownership. Again, it may not have been completely accurate... maybe someone else thought of it elsewhere, but didn't build it... but as the point of patent and copyright was always to encourage commerce, the props were given to the person/group that could promote commerce.

Just a sitenote. One has not to build a machine prior at all to patent it. You can patent things you are even unable to build (yet). You do not even have to proof something works, it just needs to be original (and not a perptuum mobile, as these get rejected apriori) Only if you don't even assume something might work, you won't bother with the patent fees.

Apparently there are many who believe we would be better off if the system was designed to "take" a patent or copyright from someone who cannot or refuses to use it, and "bestow" it upon someone who says they will. In other words, if someone else can profit better from my idea, they would have the legal right to take it.

I don't like that either, as its almost impossible to judge, if someone else may make "better" use of something. Its IMHO an error wanted to be circumvented, that is the patent monopoly rewarding your roughly the expenses you needed to get to it plus some profit. Nobody will pay 1 million in the development of a medicament and have not trying to get that million back in its monopoly use. If of course patents are granted for 20 years which took minimal input, having a hundretfold output, ofcourse somebody might say, oh I don't want to take the risk. Im happy with getting only some of the revenue without any risk, and let humanity wait 20 years to fully exploit the potential of that technology.