🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 28 Sep 1998, Decklin Foster wrote:

> 
> Patrick <patrick@howard.genetics.utah.edu> writes:
> 
> > I go with that too.  My mind and my ideas are MINE.
> 
> Yeah, and my slaves are mine, too. How dare you challenge the
> assumptions of the culture that brought me up.

Please.  You cannot possible compare something that is part and parcel of 
ME, is organic to ME (my mind and my ideas) to owning a slave.

What does it mean, then, when one has an idea but doesn't do anything 
with it?  Is this person a criminal, in this bizarre world, because 
he/she is denying an idea to the "collective mind" (from a nonexistent 
New Age fnatasy world)?  

I am not a programmer but a genetic engineer.  I suppose my ideas, if 
left unexpressed, is denying the hive of potential good medical service?  
Hardly.  I can take my ideas and patent them and start a biotech company 
based on them if I wish.  My area of programming is the cell, not the 
computer, so does this bizarro hive idea apply to my work?  My ideas are 
not, in fact, mine own but belong to the hive?

Not!  

No one has managed to explain, from what I have seen, why this goofy 
theory that ideas are hive property doesn't apply to everything, not just 
software.  A new tool conceived, designed, and produced by me should be 
free?  It is merely the steel expression of my idea.  Just like a socket 
wrench started out as an idea, the expression of that idea is the steel 
socket wrench.  Why should it not be free?  It took work to make it.  It 
took dilligence and time to express that idea in a concrete form.  This 
is NO different than software.  

If I write a book, it is copywrited and is my intellectual property.  The 
book is analagous to software...it is not a concrete thing, just the 
media that holds the idea (the story) is concrete.  Should you be able to 
acquire this book for free?  How about using the idea of my story 
(software) in a story of your own?  That is plaigerism and theft, yet 
what are you stealing?  An idea.  Should authors go unpaid for their 
work?  All they are doing is releasing ideas in written form.  No one can 
then take that idea and use it without the original author's express 
permission (and after paying for the right, quite often).

So, a socket wrench, a story in a book, software...all expressions of an 
idea that an INDIVIDUAL had.  Not a hive, not a collective mind, and 
individual.  The idea belongs to he/her who birthed it.  It only derived 
from their personal mind which is NOT the property of anyone but themselves.

patrick