Comments on: Intellectual Property vs. "Cultural Commons"

By: Steve Lindenmayer

Steve Lindenmayer — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:39:34 +0000

I think Mr. Hyde misinterprets Jefferson: “He is particularly keen to cite the ideas of the founding fathers, who, he argues, were more or less in agreement with Thomas Jefferson that “ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man.””
If Mr. Jefferson was talking about spreading ideas, I submit that he was talking about the spread of ideas like democracy and religious freedom in countries where the monarchs brutally suppressed their spread rather than the violation of intellectual property rights.

By: Lance Parkin

Lance Parkin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:18:08 +0000

Framing it as 'ideas' makes it sound like writers pull books from the air or at least from the collective unconscious, that there's no work involved.

There's also an unfortunate conflation of 'free, you don't have to pay', 'free market' and 'freedom'. Three rather different concepts.

If someone publishes something in the public domain they are, by definition, a publisher. They want to charge $7.99 for the book. Or give you a free ebook and charge you $189 for a device to read it on. It's not some utopian dream of free-flowing information, it's about charging for something they didn't pay for.

By: Bill Peschel

Bill Peschel — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:50:39 +0000

The publisher's statement needs a little more amplification before it can be judged.

After all, he's a businessman. If he can get away without paying the writer, he'll all be for it. He's a capitalist, after all. So I can't see how copyright law affects him in a negative way, unless it keeps him from pirating protected works before the law allows him.

Now, it might be a different matter for drugs. There, you're getting into profit and loss. If it takes a drug company millions to develop a drug (in part because of the regulatory regime imposed by DC to ensure a measure of quality and a lack of harmful side-effects), then doesn't the company have a right to recoup those millions?

Ah, but how many millions? How much of a profit? And who decides? The devil, after all, is in the details. Much like Hollywood accounting.

By: Suzi McGowen

Suzi McGowen — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:04:30 +0000

I think ideas and product are two different things.

By: Don

Don — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:44:16 +0000

Copyrights are extended like clockwork every time Steamboat Willie begins to be eligible for the public domain. The protection of Mickey Mouse has a lot of money behind it.

I intend to stipulate in my will that all of my copyrights revert to the public domain at the latest of my death, my wife's death and my youngest child's 25th birthday.