Re: [Patents] Lessig on Property

[Francois PELLEGRINI <pelegrin@labri.fr>]

Re all,

PILCH Hartmut wrote:
> A while ago I had some public discussions with RMS in which I said
> there was nothing wrong with the notion of "intellectual property" and
> that it could indeed be an enlightening notion if put into the proper
> context.  I also said that software patents should be seen as a
> dysfunctional (non-performant) set of rules for turning intellectual
> achievements into (virtual) property objects.

This is misleading. Patents and Copyright are no property
at all. There only exist "limited exclusion regimes" for
informational goods. This is because the economy of living
on these goods is very different.

When you own your land, are you automatically "expropriated"
after 75 years ? No. Physical property has no duration, because
basically, as for a farm land, you need to have it every year
and work at it every year, again and again, to get your subsistance
from it. All of your time and energy is required to do the same
thing, so you need the same land each year.

With informational goods, once you have created them, there is
no additional work required to make them exist. You have your
full time to create something else, from which you will also
earn a living, and thus there is no need for perpetual accumulation
of exclusion rights on informational goods (only Disney thinks it
can perpetually increase the duration of copyright of "the Mouse"
so as to earn perpetual living from it, and therefore reduces its
incentive to create high-quality cartoons - the last ones are just
crap ; not the Pixar ones, of course).

Considering such rights as "property" indeed make people think
that the end of the terms is "expropriation" and that there
should exist unlimited "property" rights for information goods
as well. This is a biased word, which should be avoided.



                                        f.p.