Schlafly on Copyright

WildJoeWild writes "Copyright extremists are working to control as much information as possible. Almost every week we see a new example of how they are thwarting the free flow of information. Read the rest of the article here."

Comments

she's quite a smart lady.

[zogger]

--she's a smart lady. Reading the editorial she wrote, she's certainly not a "luddite" and her religious faith is her's, there's nothing in there that is trying to force it on anyone. I've listened to her a lot, she's pretty respectful of other's rights. And you'll also find that just plain old vanilla common sense and "decency" crosses political "party" lines. Our original Constitution was written for such a reason, to codify in "english" not lawyerese nonsense some "common sense". It's not a "republican" or "democrat" written document, either, thank goodness, if those guys tried to do it again today it would be FUBARed before they even set pen to paper.

Best advice I would have for anyone is to step away from the old paradigms of following any "party lines" rhetoric and even to cease getting sucked into the extremely limiting parameters of identifying one's self as "right" or "left" leaning and instead just differentiate "right" and "wrong". Makes things a lot easier to sort out.

I manage to catch her little two minute daily audio editorials listening to various net broadcasts carried on Genesis Communications, a pretty good collection of shows with a more traditional US constitutional (and common sense) "Independent" viewpoint as opposed to acting like most talk shows as pure propoganda arms of one or the other of the two dominant political for-profit gangs, err, I mean "partys", for example the two biggees of the "establishment" like Rush Limbeau and Larry King. I consider those shows to be more like political training wheels for people just starting to get any sort of political interest going, once you can get a balance and want to go further (which should take like one show apiece from those two gents to see it for what it is, establishment propoganda), the offerings from genesis are a lot more real and hardcore freedom-oriented, as are some of the other independent media outlets.

FWIW, here is Mrs. Schalfly's website, Eagle Forum.

Re:Hell just froze over

[studerby]

"Intellectual property" is great example of "semantic creep".

The term was first used by specialists - law school professors - to categorize the law of patents, trademark, copyright, and trade secrets (and probably other stuff). All of these are valuable intangibles with very, very different legal basis; however they tend to get lumped together in law school because they're more similar to each other than they are to anything else. Legal people are of course very aware of those differences; patent attornies don't normally do copyright work and vice versa...

Because it was a handy term, it made its way into general usage, but like many technical terms that migrate into the public realm, the nuances of meaning don't always make it (e.g. "hacker"). To a legal person, there's lots of kinds of property, with all sorts of attributes, such as expiration (e.g. a stock option); to the average lay person, if the hear "something property", they think about the kind of property they know best, personal property, and assume that this new kind of property has most of those attributes, including permenant ownership and total control.

In other words, personal property is the lay person's prototype when thinking about property of any kind, and "intellectual property" has been used to shift the ground of the debate by inducing assumptions about the nature of a copyright.