This is the way nobody gets anywhere. Power and corruption are both finally analytical tools (as are, interestingly, feminism and racial analysis).
This strikes me as the entire problem with this discussion of IP: It's asking the wrong question.
Lets take a simple case: Marxism. Analyze any set of relationships, and use as your mental knife, the sorting factor for these relationships, the concept of power. What do you get? Inequity.
Well, gosh, if there's inequity present, that's bad! Problem: That's the only thing that sort of analysis will get you. So, you can shift the weights around. The workers of the world can unite, whatever. Analyze that using the same tools. What do you get? Inequity.
Oh no! It's still broke! Let's fix it again...
But finally, that nice surgical knife of who has power and who doesn't makes a cut that has a fractal boundary. You can never be finished examining things and say "now we have an equitable solution."
If we're lucky, we get a set of successive approximations that don't result in excessive suffering.
So what it comes down to is that power/corruption is an interesting analytical tool - but it is not one that results in useful solutions. What we need is a better way of thinking about information, if we want to solve the IP issue.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the way nobody gets anywhere. Power and corruption are both finally analytical tools (as are, interestingly, feminism and racial analysis).
This strikes me as the entire problem with this discussion of IP: It's asking the wrong question.
Lets take a simple case: Marxism. Analyze any set of relationships, and use as your mental knife, the sorting factor for these relationships, the concept of power. What do you get? Inequity.
Well, gosh, if there's inequity present, that's bad! Problem: That's the only thing that sort of analysis will get you. So, you can shift the weights around. The workers of the world can unite, whatever. Analyze that using the same tools. What do you get? Inequity.
Oh no! It's still broke! Let's fix it again...
But finally, that nice surgical knife of who has power and who doesn't makes a cut that has a fractal boundary. You can never be finished examining things and say "now we have an equitable solution."
If we're lucky, we get a set of successive approximations that don't result in excessive suffering.
So what it comes down to is that power/corruption is an interesting analytical tool - but it is not one that results in useful solutions. What we need is a better way of thinking about information, if we want to solve the IP issue.
We need better memes.
-tdb