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List:       openoffice-discuss
Subject:    Re: [discuss] Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: [discuss] Open source software News
From:       "Charles Johnson" <geekery () radgeek ! com>
Date:       2004-05-29 14:27:23
Message-ID: opr8rmfxralsidh7 () smtp ! 1and1 ! com
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On Fri, 28 May 2004 21:44:16 +0100, Timothy Baldwin  
<T.E.Baldwin99@members.leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

> On Saturday 22 May 2004 15:03, Ralph Janke wrote:

>> Tom, you are absolutely right. GPL is based on the foundation of a
>> working copyright law. Also GPL is far less socialistic
>> than patents.

> How do claim that patents, a form intelluctual propiery, and therefore a  
> form of private propetry, are socialistic?

I'm not sure that "socialistic" is the right word to use in this context;  
Rod Engelsman's correction to "feudalistic" was, I think, an apt one. But  
a couple more points need to be made, I think, to clarify the thought.

People who enforce claims of "private property rights" is not necessarily  
a definitive feature of a free market. People have been making proprietary  
claims for a very long time; medieval tyrants, for example, routinely  
asserted that all the deer in the forest, and all the fish in the sea,  
belonged to them as their own private property. And indeed they enforced  
these claims against any poor peasant they could lay their hands on who  
happened to be treading on their "rights."

What makes for a free market is when people have full and protected  
private property rights--but only over those things that they *actually*  
have a reasonable claim to own: that is, everything that they have made  
through their own honest labor, or been freely given (either in exchange  
for something else that they own, or _gratis_). But it's not clear *at  
all* that copyright or patent laws can be justified as property claims in  
such a situation, any more than the King's claim to own all the deer in  
England or an American slaver's claim to own the people whom he abducted  
and imprisoned against their will. Why? Well, because if I buy a book from  
you, and make a copy of it, then the copy of the book I made is *not*  
something that you made; it's something that *I* made. So what right have  
you got to tell me what to do with it? (The same goes, _mutatis mutandis_,  
if you tell me about this device that you created, and I create another  
device that works just the same way. If you don't want me to copy your  
nifty device, then you shouldn't tell me how yours works--or you should  
make me agree not to copy it before you tell me how it works.)

The free market demands free software. Copyright and patent are a form of  
phony "property right" which the King or Queen--or its modern bureaucratic  
stand-ins--dole out to people who have done nothing to deserve it; it is  
*not* part of a free market, but rather a form of *government-granted* and  
*government-enforced* monopoly.

N.B.: I leave aside the question of whether copyrights and patents are  
"capitalistic." "Capitalism" is a word which has *at least* two or three  
completely distinct, and in fact antagonistic, meanings. One of those  
meanings is equivalent with "free markets", and so would rule out  
copyrights and patents; the others are not, and so could quite happily  
co-eixst with them. Which of these meanings is the right one to use is not  
a question I think I can answer; in most cases I think it is best simply  
to abandon the term as both confused and confusing.

[. . . snip . . .]

-C

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