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Re: patents suck



[email protected] (Anonymous) wrote:

>Bullshit. Corporations do not work; their employees do.  The
>creativity of employees is sat upon as net worth, but nothing
>is produced.  Money is only worth something if it is circulating
>in an economy; a corporation only has worth if it produces
>something.
>
>Instead corporations produce nothing.  They sit on resources,
>preventing anyone else from producing, because the current system
>favors non-production and an inflationary and wasteful economy
>based on speculation.

Mmmmmhhh.  Although the state of affairs you point out in the above paragraph
unfortunately exist, your first paragraph denotes your vision of the world...

In today's economy, with a monetary system not backed by a physical standard,
it is true, in a sense.  Unfortunately.  


>>And the property rights *are* fundamentals (even if not

>No, they are not fundamental anything. They are taken for granted
>in the modern West as a rationale. It's a nice one, and I don't
>have too many arguments... except when people claim a false
>dilemma of either total private property or total socialism.

So, what other dilemna do you have to oppose to my false one?


>Why not a form of property based on use?
It is a contradiction in term.

>It was originally
>a rationale in Europe... <snip> ...despire the
>fact that natives and settlers lived there.

The fact that they might have rationalized thugish behaviour 400years ago 
is not relevant to the discussion.  Would you rape the next village's girls?
After all, it was certainly current practice 400 years ago, *somewhere* ...


>Extended to patents... corporations do a lot of R but no D, but
>legally no one else can make use of it either.  Unisys didn't
>market LZW compression and let everyone else use it... then they
>decided they should have been making losts of mulah and wanted
>to pull the plug and get royalities.  IBM has done negligable
>production on arithmetic coding, so a lot of independ developers
>ignore the patents.  Similar arguments can be made about PK
>crypto.

I won't comment on this one, since I do not accept that my morality be held hostage
by the actions of others.  I do not mean to absolve Corp. Inc that just tries to make
money through speculation rather than production.  But the argument does not even 
desserve an answer.  I am not a psycho-epistemologist...


>>You can not have your cake and eat it too...
>Huh? What does that have to do with this argument?

You cannot makes rules that protect a basic principle and at the same time have 
exceptions based on whims.  Because the latter will destroy the first.

**** NEW PGP 2.6.2 KEY *********
This key is actually suspended, as of Feb, 16 1996, was never distributed,
and might be subject to deletion.  Sorry for the trouble my mis-management might have caused.

2048 bits Key ID:24201BA1 1996/02/13 Jean-Francois Avon <[email protected]>
Key fingerprint =  23 B6 24 31 86 67 FB 35  C7 A7 AF 12 A1 61 E9 3D 


**** OLD KEY: DO NOT USE ANYMORE UNLESS FOR VERIFYING SIGNATURES ****

1024 bits Key ID:57214AED 1995/10/04 Jean-Francois Avon <[email protected]>
Key fingerprint =  84 96 76 AE EB 7C AB 15  88 47 87 B0 18 31 74 9F