Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
It is interesting, and I find surprising, to see the number of people that don't see abstract creations as a property to be bought and sold and inherited. (Or that's the way I interpret some of the posts here that would, seemingly arbitrarily, strip this property from the current owner, like repossessing a house.)
At first I thought it might be because intellectual property is abstract, and its status as a property is due largely to provisions in law. But then I thought about business. A business may have physical assets, but its actual value is largely abstract, and its status as a property is quite distinct from its physical assets. Few people seem to have trouble with the idea that a business (or shares in a business) is property that can be bought and sold and inherited.
Or is it that people don't like the idea of people earning money for something when they are no longer working for it? (Never mind that the labour may not have been paid for in the first place.) But few people complain about the interest or dividends that they receive on their investments - investments they are happy to buy, sell and leave in their wills. So this can't be it either.
Is it simply that intellectual property can be so easily copied now that people think the value is in the electromagnetic arrangements rather than the abstract concept they represent? Perhaps the logic is that since I can easily have a million copies of something, the value of any one of those copies must be negligible. So here, give me the original and I'll make a million copies, but I'll only read one of them and pay the creator one millionth of the cover price.
None of this is to argue that copyright should be longer or permanent, there are other factors at play, but I do wonder if our view of the value of intellectual property is being unjustly distorted by technology.
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Of course it's being distorted by technology! It only came into
existence by technology. (i.e. the printing press). Technology created it, and technology is killing it...
For more detail, see my mongraph here on Mobileread -
And The World Changed.