I had an opportunity to visit the Green Bank complex a couple of years ago, and loved it. For your inner Mech. Eng., there's some really, really big, impressive structures. For your inner physicist or astronomer, there's a pretty damn good museum with lots of astrophysical trivia for amusement. And for your inner child, there's a periodic (live!) presentation in the museum auditorium, complete with a dewar of LN2 that they use to freeze balloons, drive a nail with a banana, and (finally, the best part) scare the little ones by tossing it on the floor right in front of them.
Seriously, it was a lot of fun. Even the 5-year-old enjoyed it.
Thought, discovery, identity... they're all abstract things. You can't own things like that; no one can.
Yup. And I'll assert again that the whole legal structure took a wrong turn in attempting to frame the protections for creators in terms of "property". Again, what is really at stake is the right to "enjoy the fruits of one's labors".
You can't own a thought or a discovery, but you can sure lose a lot of sweat and sleep coming up with one. That labor deserves to be rewarded, whether with money, good repute, or some other form of reward.
But what the DMCA (and similar "intellectual property" law) protects is primarily the fruit of the putative labor of the corporate media manager. Insofar as it focusses on the rights of the corporate media outlet, rather than those of the creator of The Work, it is inherently flawed.
IANAL and all that, but I always had the naive thought that "intellectual property" was not about a "property" right, per se, but about the right to "enjoy the fruit of one's own labor". Here, read "fruit" as including, but not limited to, the commercial fruits ($$$, if what my labors have produced has monetary value to someone) and what I'll call "reputational fruits" -- the right to be identified as the author or performer of a unique or novel work, and to be praised for it (if it's good).
I'll grant you that "intellectual property" then becomes a misnomer, since it seems to apply property law principles to what is really a question of just compensation for effort. Nevertheless, even if it's misnamed, I'd not want to call it a "myth".
> Novell and Microsoft both disregard Netscape as > a competitor in the directory market. Well, that's not especially bright on their part, is it? As ogren points out, the folk who are implementing LDAP directly (i.e., using an RFC'ed open standard, rather than an internal, proprietary framework) predominantly use NS's Directory Server. One also notes that it was the Netscape LDAP API that was used to "talk" to both the Novell and Microsoft products in the "benchmark". Hmm.
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I had an opportunity to visit the Green Bank complex a couple of years ago, and loved it. For your inner Mech. Eng., there's some really, really big, impressive structures. For your inner physicist or astronomer, there's a pretty damn good museum with lots of astrophysical trivia for amusement. And for your inner child, there's a periodic (live!) presentation in the museum auditorium, complete with a dewar of LN2 that they use to freeze balloons, drive a nail with a banana, and (finally, the best part) scare the little ones by tossing it on the floor right in front of them.
Seriously, it was a lot of fun. Even the 5-year-old enjoyed it.
Thought, discovery, identity... they're all abstract things. You can't own things like that; no one can.
Yup. And I'll assert again that the whole legal structure took a wrong turn in attempting to frame the protections for creators in terms of "property". Again, what is really at stake is the right to "enjoy the fruits of one's labors".
You can't own a thought or a discovery, but you can sure lose a lot of sweat and sleep coming up with one. That labor deserves to be rewarded, whether with money, good repute, or some other form of reward.
But what the DMCA (and similar "intellectual property" law) protects is primarily the fruit of the putative labor of the corporate media manager. Insofar as it focusses on the rights of the corporate media outlet, rather than those of the creator of The Work, it is inherently flawed.
IANAL and all that, but I always had the naive thought that "intellectual property" was not about a "property" right, per se, but about the right to "enjoy the fruit of one's own labor". Here, read "fruit" as including, but not limited to, the commercial fruits ($$$, if what my labors have produced has monetary value to someone) and what I'll call "reputational fruits" -- the right to be identified as the author or performer of a unique or novel work, and to be praised for it (if it's good).
I'll grant you that "intellectual property" then becomes a misnomer, since it seems to apply property law principles to what is really a question of just compensation for effort. Nevertheless, even if it's misnamed, I'd not want to call it a "myth".
> Novell and Microsoft both disregard Netscape as > a competitor in the directory market. Well, that's not especially bright on their part, is it? As ogren points out, the folk who are implementing LDAP directly (i.e., using an RFC'ed open standard, rather than an internal, proprietary framework) predominantly use NS's Directory Server. One also notes that it was the Netscape LDAP API that was used to "talk" to both the Novell and Microsoft products in the "benchmark". Hmm.