Intelligent Design is falsifiable in many of its claims. Its principal claim is a set of objections to the theory of evolution, such as the absense of intermediate forms in the fossil record. Such claims can be falsified by answering them. In the case of intermediate forms the answer is twofold. It was answered first that intermediate forms do exist in the fossil record. But the second answer was more interesting, it was the idea that evolution is not a gradual and continuous process but rather that it proceeds with long periods of stability punctuated by short periods of rapid change. This is an example of how the challenge to evolution led to a refinement of the theory.
Another way to falsify some of the claims of Intelligent Design is to simulate evolution with computers. I have done this and it was quite enlightening. In order to be successful at it you need lots of the features that actually happen in the world, many of which biologists don't address (such as the evolutionary need for long sequences of junk DNA).
Also, note that the claim that the universe exists independently of any supporting context could also be falsified by creating a system that, once created, existed without any supporting, underlying system. For example, you might create a video game that, once it started, did not need a video game console or any other such apparatus to continue its operation. Or you might point out somewhere that a dream existed without a dreamer. The general principle appears to be that all such cosmoses of interacting elements exist because there is some underlying system within which they exist, to think the universe we live in should be otherwise seems to ignore all the available evidence.
You still seem to be avoiding the point that the issue is government censorship of ideas. You claim that I want religions to get privileged access using the state. I do not. As I have said over and over, I oppose the notion of public schools. I think that public schools are a threat to liberty because curricula always involve censorship of ideas, and the government should not be censoring ideas. I would not oppose government financing of an education through vouchers, but only if the parents were completely free to choose the curriculum from all those offered by schools.
The establishment clause also has little to do with theocracy. The Constitution establishes a republic, which (by definition) is not a theocracy. There are lots of governments that have state religions (e.g. Great Britain and Germany), but these are not necessarily theocracies. The inclusion of religion doesn't turn a republic into a theocracy, rather the exclusion (or suppression) of democracy does. Theocracy is not what the founders feared, rather the founders did not want the federal government collecting taxes in support of particular churches. They did not want a state religion. Their experience was not with theocracy, but rather with the English system of supporting the established Church of England through taxes, a practice that had existed in some of the colonies as well. Note that the phrase is somewhat oddly worded if you interpret it as you do. It doesn't say that there should be no law "establishing a religion", or even "establishing religion", but rather that there should be "no law respecting an establishment of religion"--in other words churches are to be independent of government and unregulated.
Not all brands of atheism are secularism, for example Buddhism is (in some forms) atheist but is not secular. Secularism does represent a particular opinion with respect to religion. Were it not so, then secularism would not enjoy the protection that it enjoys under the first amendment. What you want is to establish a state religion, or at least to establish a religious view--the religious view that spiritual concerns are unimportant. At a minimum, the imposition of secularism imposes the religious doctrine of dualism. Secularism is a religious view in the same sense that a shaved head is a hairstyle. If the Supreme Court ruled that the first amendment protected freedom of hairstyle, then the government would be wrong to mandate that everyone shave his head. Similarly, we have guarantees of freedom of religion and it is thus wrong for the government to establish secularism as the state religion.
I am surprised to find that you don't think that having government exclude ideas from classrooms amounts to censorship. Do you really mean to say that for you to tax me to establish a system of education that suppresses particular views is not censorship? It actually is worse than censorship in a way, normal censorship prevents people from expressing ideas, the public school system is designed to make the taboo ideas literally unthinkable.
You say that I am free to express religious ideas. However children in public schools are not free to do so. The state monopolizes thirteen of the formative years of children (K-12). The goal of this education is to enculturate the children. It takes very little time to teach people the things they learn in schools--they read maybe 100 books, learn algebra and geometry, and a few notions of science. Most of the time is spent in cultural training--the government teaching children to value the things the government values.
Radke and Trager's famous study showing that black children were disparaged by a lack of positive images of blacks in the society was instrumental in getting those images included in schools. Similarly, providing children of religious familiies schools that depict no positive images of people from their religious cultures is discriminatory and denies those children the equal protection of laws.
I agree that anyone who creates a curriculum will always exclude ideas. I am not arguing against private individuals deciding for themselves what ideas to accept and what ideas to reject. I am arguing against government making that decision for the individuals in question. In other words, my fundamental issue is not with evolution vs intelligent design, but with the threat to liberty posed by the public school system as it is currently devised--with government acting as the censor.
You seem to be advocating a position where the majority votes on which ideas should be promoted and which ideas should be suppressed. You seem to be convinced that the majority will accept whatever scientific findings are currently in vogue as being "true", and that this will be the basis for their suppression of other ideas. Even if your notion that science holds the answers is correct, I doubt that the general public has the depths of understanding of science required to ensure that scientific truths win out in the curriculum.
My educational background is in Physics. As a physics graduate student, almost everything I learned was a contradiction to the view of reality that most people hold. Even to the extent that the names for advanced ideas in Physics are widely believed to represent truth (i.e. relativity, wave-particle duality, Heisenberg uncertainty, etc.) the public perception of these ideas is only a caricature of the actual ideas. When the typical person says he accepts the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the thing he typically has in mind (that the energy transfer of making a measurement creates a change in the state of the system) is so far from the actual principle as to be almost the very thing rejected by it.
The main impact of introducing Intelligent Design into the classroom would be that there would arise a much larger group of people with an interest in developing falsifiable experiments that would allow people to decide between the two theories. Even if it turned out (as I suspect) that evolution is generally the right way to go, I think that it will only help our understanding of the theory to subject it to such challenges. These experiments would also help theologians, who might have to refine their thoughts on their religious beliefs to accommodate the results of these experiments. Censorship is the wrong way to handle these objections.
Clearly the point of the establishment clause is not to promote secularism. If that were the case, the establishment clause would not have been followed immediately by the free exercise clause. The two go hand in hand. If the framers had wanted to disparage religion in favor of secularism, they would not have forbade laws that restrict any exercise of religion in any forum as they did in the free exercise clause. Farthest from their minds was the censorship of religious speech.
The purpose of the bill of rights is to enshrine the notion that the proper sovereign of the nation is the consensus will of the people. The framers held, rightly, that the evolution of this consensus begins with the individual's religious views, which is why this is the first freedom that they protected. There is no clear separation between religious and political views, political views arise from religious conviction. Or to put it another way, in science, there is no moral distinction between any two arrangements of atoms in the universe, the distinctions of morality arise only from value judgements and these are influenced by religious belief (e.g. the belief that human beings should be treated as equally sovereign).
The framers then went on, properly, to protect the right of people to influence others with freedom of speech and of the press, treating this linguistically as related to the right to free exercise of religion.
There is nothing in the first amendment that condones censorship of ideas, religious or otherwise, but of all ideas, religious ideas are granted particular protection.
I do not think that religion and science are totally distinct, philosophically. Although it is certainly the case that contrdictory axiomatic structures can exist, they cannot exist together (except in the trivial system where no idea is rejected). But without getting to whether my integrated view of reality is true, I totally reject the notion that the government should favor your view over mine through censorship and the suppression of ideological liberty.
Although I think that the rejection of religion is irrational in that this rejection is contrary to reasonable conclusions based on widespread, available experience and can only be maintained because of a willingness of people to cook the intellectual books by erecting (as you have advocated) walls of separation between ideas such that they are never bothered by the doublethink required to maintain the atheist ideology, I do not think that the unlikelihood of atheism should justify having the government suppress it. If you hold that falsity is a proper basis for censorship, then (given my belief that atheism is false) on what basis do you think I should restrain myself from advocating censorship of your views?
It seems to me that you want free speech for yourself only.
No I am not saying that the government should violate the Establishment Clause, quite the opposite.
After all, the essence of the establishment clause is that the government should not favor one ideology over another--in other words that the government should not be in the business of giving its endorsement to one view of reality over another. People have (and endorse) ideologies, government should not. Naturally, in a democracy, the laws will reflect a consensus that arises from a political negotiation between people, and thus laws will reflect ideologies--but the essence of democracy is that the political concensus should arise from the bottom up and not because government has stacked the deck in favor of (or against) particular ideologies.
I also take issue with your notion that reality is compartmentalized in such a way that there are clear boundaries between educational disciplines. You would allow that something could be appropriate to teach in one discipline but should only be censored from study in particular disciplines. I think that reality is self-consistent, and thus that truths that arise in one discipline ought to be consistent with truths that arise in any other discipline. To the extent there appears to be a contradiction between the disciplines, it is appropriate for students to have some forum for resolving those contradictions. Your establishment of a Chinese wall between disciplines ensures that such questions of interdisciplinary contradictions can be examined in neither classroom.
Let me get this straight, you think that censorship of false ideas should be endorsed because otherwise people will come to believe that 2 + 2 = 5? And you think that this illustrates the silliness of the anti-censorship position?
The place where your argument falls down is that you beg the question. You assume that government must be the arbiter of truth and then claim that if government declares any false (or even questionable) idea as true, then it must present all false ideas as being true.
My position is that the problem arises only because of the view that the government is to be the arbiter of truth. Government sometimes censors facts (e.g. details of troop movements) because the knowledge of those facts presents a security risk, but government only censors ideas that it holds to be false. By far the greater threat to liberty is the censorship of ideas rather than the censorship of particular facts.
To me, there are two separate questions with Intelligent Design. The first is whether it is true, the second is whether it should be excluded by law from school curricula. I don't know if it is true, but I know that there are lots of systems that work well despite having no inherent designed-in goals (e.g. the free market). So I don't quite buy the premise that complex systematic behavior implies an intelligent design. On the other hand, usually when I see some world "from the outside" (a movie, a dream, a novel, a video game, etc.) I would be surprised to find that there was no underlying system that supported and governed the existence of that world (however undetectable that system was within the context of the world in question). So the evidence I have from example after example is that the parts of interacting systems can interact only because the are contained within and operate within some unifying system. Maybe the universe isn't like that, but if it isn't then it is unusual in that respect. If this principle is general, then I am led to think that underlying all is a base system that is a unity with no parts, and yet which can support the diversity of creation and which can manifest consciousness.
But the question of whether Intelligent Design is true is far different from the question of whether government should decide if it should be a part of the curriculum of schools. This issue only arises because the schools are government schools, but that just begs the question. I don't think that many people believe in freedom of expression and freedom of ideology because they think that all protected ideas are true. Rather I think that these protections are important because fundamental to democracy is the equal standing of individuals, based on whatever intellect and experience they have, to decide for themselves which ideas to accept. Governments never censor ideas they find to be harmless, thus the protections against censorship imply the right of people to hold and express ideas that the government finds to be harmful, including ideas that are found to be harmful because they are wrong.
Any loss of this protection will, of course, begin with the censorship of ideas that are most widely believed to be harmful, and which are held only by a few extremists. But it isn't really necessary to protect against ideas that aren't widely held, unless there is some compelling aspect of those ideas (such as their truth or their poetry or some other aspect) that would cause them to flourish, so the main effect of such censorship is to establish the principle under which censorship can extend to other areas where, apart from the censorship, there would be widespread debate and perhaps dialectic.
There is no greater threat to the freedom of ideas than the notion that the government should decide for us which ideas should be held and promulgated, and which ideas should not be. The public school system, by giving some ideas the imprimatur of government, and by effectively making other, opposing, ideas almost unthinkiable by the masses of people who are educated within those schools, is a grave threat to liberty.
The right way to oppose Intelligent Design is to present convincing arguments for alternative views, not to enlist government to dominate the intellectual lives of 90% of our children in such a way that arguments for Intelligent Design are excluded, a priori, by the design of the educational system.
> No, there aren't. > Many writers choose to work in a carribean > island. This has absolutely no effect on the > way their books are protected in US (by US law) > or EU (by EU directives or national law).
It is a reasonable point, but I am still not convinced.
Although it may be legitimate for MS to use plant location as a prod on this issue even apart from whether the location of the developers makes a difference (as when someone might refuse to do business with a store whose management supports a cause they don't like), I'll stick to the issue of whether it does make a difference.
Furthermore, I think that the ethics in this situation depend on MS's perception that they have a legitimate business reason to prefer to develop software where patent protection is available, it is legitimate to act in accord with one's beliefs about business success, even if those beliefs are wrong.
So it isn't enough to say that it doesn't matter, or even to prove that it doesn't matter. What counts is whether MS believes that it doesn't matter.
In any case, I think that your claim rests on a quirk of copyright law, which is that the entire matter being protected is publicly available and entails no base of knowledge or expertise that resides with the author alone, apart from the published material.
But copyright law alone cannot be the issue, because the EU does (AFAIK) allow software to be copyrighted. So I think the issue is the underlying knowledge and expertise rather than some published expression. I think that the issue is that MS wants to create a barrier to competition by protecting a body of expertise that it has allocated resources towards developing or otherwise acquiring. The protection could include a combination of copyright, patent, trade secret, and contract protections.
If MS spends $X to develop a body of expertise, that is then available to competitors at $0, then this clearly puts MS in a bad competitive position.
The protection doesn't have to be perfect, but it is better if it is more expensive to overcome. One way for another company to obtain the expertise might be to hire the developers. This could be an illegal strategy in areas where intellectual property is protected, and would likely be more expensive for others if it involved expatriation of the developers.
So I don't think that it is, in all cases, immaterial what the laws are where the software is developed.
In other cases, a complex interplay of the various protections could be involved. I am wondering if it might be the case that a software patent could be necessary, but not sufficient, to develop a complete competing product.
For example, a software patent could protect a way of delivering licensed media. The license to use the server software could include access to cryptographically secured and traceable keys, but could restrict trading those keys with areas that did not respect the patents. Media players worldwide might be able to play the media, but the content might, because of the restrictions on servers, have to originate in a nation that respected the patents. A knock-off system could exist in a country that did not respect the patents, but it wouldn't be able to deliver content worldwide, since it would exclude areas where the knock-off client software infringed the patents.
The point here is that the different components of intellectual property protection might work together to make knowledge of the algorithm less useful in areas where the license to the other components was unobtainable, and yet the patent protection could make license protection workable in other areas.
Seems like it is extortion, but only if it is illegal. Blackmail would have been the threat against Gates of revealing the extortion.
This is extortion in much the same way that if you get a better deal at store A than at store B, or if the manager at store B is rude to you, you might choose to buy from store A and you might remind the manager of store B that you have this power. Certainly it is using the power as a customer of your right to say no, but this may not be illegal, and therefore may not be extortion.
On the other hand, it may not have been a matter of retalliation at all. It may be that Microsoft was concerned that they would not own the intellectual property developed by Navision if those remained in Europe. There may be legitimate business reasons to develop intellectual property in those places where it is better protected.
Slashdot Mirror
"can we agree that teaching unfalsifiable tautologies in science class rooms is a waste of time"
You know, almost any idea is unfalsifiable if one's mind is sufficiently closed.
Intelligent Design is falsifiable in many of its claims. Its principal claim is a set of objections to the theory of evolution, such as the absense of intermediate forms in the fossil record. Such claims can be falsified by answering them. In the case of intermediate forms the answer is twofold. It was answered first that intermediate forms do exist in the fossil record. But the second answer was more interesting, it was the idea that evolution is not a gradual and continuous process but rather that it proceeds with long periods of stability punctuated by short periods of rapid change. This is an example of how the challenge to evolution led to a refinement of the theory.
Another way to falsify some of the claims of Intelligent Design is to simulate evolution with computers. I have done this and it was quite enlightening. In order to be successful at it you need lots of the features that actually happen in the world, many of which biologists don't address (such as the evolutionary need for long sequences of junk DNA).
Also, note that the claim that the universe exists independently of any supporting context could also be falsified by creating a system that, once created, existed without any supporting, underlying system. For example, you might create a video game that, once it started, did not need a video game console or any other such apparatus to continue its operation. Or you might point out somewhere that a dream existed without a dreamer. The general principle appears to be that all such cosmoses of interacting elements exist because there is some underlying system within which they exist, to think the universe we live in should be otherwise seems to ignore all the available evidence.
You still seem to be avoiding the point that the issue is government censorship of ideas. You claim that I want religions to get privileged access using the state. I do not. As I have said over and over, I oppose the notion of public schools. I think that public schools are a threat to liberty because curricula always involve censorship of ideas, and the government should not be censoring ideas. I would not oppose government financing of an education through vouchers, but only if the parents were completely free to choose the curriculum from all those offered by schools.
The establishment clause also has little to do with theocracy. The Constitution establishes a republic, which (by definition) is not a theocracy. There are lots of governments that have state religions (e.g. Great Britain and Germany), but these are not necessarily theocracies. The inclusion of religion doesn't turn a republic into a theocracy, rather the exclusion (or suppression) of democracy does. Theocracy is not what the founders feared, rather the founders did not want the federal government collecting taxes in support of particular churches. They did not want a state religion. Their experience was not with theocracy, but rather with the English system of supporting the established Church of England through taxes, a practice that had existed in some of the colonies as well. Note that the phrase is somewhat oddly worded if you interpret it as you do. It doesn't say that there should be no law "establishing a religion", or even "establishing religion", but rather that there should be "no law respecting an establishment of religion"--in other words churches are to be independent of government and unregulated.
Not all brands of atheism are secularism, for example Buddhism is (in some forms) atheist but is not secular. Secularism does represent a particular opinion with respect to religion. Were it not so, then secularism would not enjoy the protection that it enjoys under the first amendment. What you want is to establish a state religion, or at least to establish a religious view--the religious view that spiritual concerns are unimportant. At a minimum, the imposition of secularism imposes the religious doctrine of dualism. Secularism is a religious view in the same sense that a shaved head is a hairstyle. If the Supreme Court ruled that the first amendment protected freedom of hairstyle, then the government would be wrong to mandate that everyone shave his head. Similarly, we have guarantees of freedom of religion and it is thus wrong for the government to establish secularism as the state religion.
I am surprised to find that you don't think that having government exclude ideas from classrooms amounts to censorship. Do you really mean to say that for you to tax me to establish a system of education that suppresses particular views is not censorship? It actually is worse than censorship in a way, normal censorship prevents people from expressing ideas, the public school system is designed to make the taboo ideas literally unthinkable.
You say that I am free to express religious ideas. However children in public schools are not free to do so. The state monopolizes thirteen of the formative years of children (K-12). The goal of this education is to enculturate the children. It takes very little time to teach people the things they learn in schools--they read maybe 100 books, learn algebra and geometry, and a few notions of science. Most of the time is spent in cultural training--the government teaching children to value the things the government values.
Radke and Trager's famous study showing that black children were disparaged by a lack of positive images of blacks in the society was instrumental in getting those images included in schools. Similarly, providing children of religious familiies schools that depict no positive images of people from their religious cultures is discriminatory and denies those children the equal protection of laws.
There is no question that Intelli
I agree that anyone who creates a curriculum will always exclude ideas. I am not arguing against private individuals deciding for themselves what ideas to accept and what ideas to reject. I am arguing against government making that decision for the individuals in question. In other words, my fundamental issue is not with evolution vs intelligent design, but with the threat to liberty posed by the public school system as it is currently devised--with government acting as the censor.
You seem to be advocating a position where the majority votes on which ideas should be promoted and which ideas should be suppressed. You seem to be convinced that the majority will accept whatever scientific findings are currently in vogue as being "true", and that this will be the basis for their suppression of other ideas. Even if your notion that science holds the answers is correct, I doubt that the general public has the depths of understanding of science required to ensure that scientific truths win out in the curriculum.
My educational background is in Physics. As a physics graduate student, almost everything I learned was a contradiction to the view of reality that most people hold. Even to the extent that the names for advanced ideas in Physics are widely believed to represent truth (i.e. relativity, wave-particle duality, Heisenberg uncertainty, etc.) the public perception of these ideas is only a caricature of the actual ideas. When the typical person says he accepts the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the thing he typically has in mind (that the energy transfer of making a measurement creates a change in the state of the system) is so far from the actual principle as to be almost the very thing rejected by it.
The main impact of introducing Intelligent Design into the classroom would be that there would arise a much larger group of people with an interest in developing falsifiable experiments that would allow people to decide between the two theories. Even if it turned out (as I suspect) that evolution is generally the right way to go, I think that it will only help our understanding of the theory to subject it to such challenges. These experiments would also help theologians, who might have to refine their thoughts on their religious beliefs to accommodate the results of these experiments. Censorship is the wrong way to handle these objections.
Clearly the point of the establishment clause is not to promote secularism. If that were the case, the establishment clause would not have been followed immediately by the free exercise clause. The two go hand in hand. If the framers had wanted to disparage religion in favor of secularism, they would not have forbade laws that restrict any exercise of religion in any forum as they did in the free exercise clause. Farthest from their minds was the censorship of religious speech.
The purpose of the bill of rights is to enshrine the notion that the proper sovereign of the nation is the consensus will of the people. The framers held, rightly, that the evolution of this consensus begins with the individual's religious views, which is why this is the first freedom that they protected. There is no clear separation between religious and political views, political views arise from religious conviction. Or to put it another way, in science, there is no moral distinction between any two arrangements of atoms in the universe, the distinctions of morality arise only from value judgements and these are influenced by religious belief (e.g. the belief that human beings should be treated as equally sovereign).
The framers then went on, properly, to protect the right of people to influence others with freedom of speech and of the press, treating this linguistically as related to the right to free exercise of religion.
There is nothing in the first amendment that condones censorship of ideas, religious or otherwise, but of all ideas, religious ideas are granted particular protection.
I do not think that religion and science are totally distinct, philosophically. Although it is certainly the case that contrdictory axiomatic structures can exist, they cannot exist together (except in the trivial system where no idea is rejected). But without getting to whether my integrated view of reality is true, I totally reject the notion that the government should favor your view over mine through censorship and the suppression of ideological liberty.
Although I think that the rejection of religion is irrational in that this rejection is contrary to reasonable conclusions based on widespread, available experience and can only be maintained because of a willingness of people to cook the intellectual books by erecting (as you have advocated) walls of separation between ideas such that they are never bothered by the doublethink required to maintain the atheist ideology, I do not think that the unlikelihood of atheism should justify having the government suppress it. If you hold that falsity is a proper basis for censorship, then (given my belief that atheism is false) on what basis do you think I should restrain myself from advocating censorship of your views?
It seems to me that you want free speech for yourself only.
No I am not saying that the government should violate the Establishment Clause, quite the opposite.
After all, the essence of the establishment clause is that the government should not favor one ideology over another--in other words that the government should not be in the business of giving its endorsement to one view of reality over another. People have (and endorse) ideologies, government should not. Naturally, in a democracy, the laws will reflect a consensus that arises from a political negotiation between people, and thus laws will reflect ideologies--but the essence of democracy is that the political concensus should arise from the bottom up and not because government has stacked the deck in favor of (or against) particular ideologies.
I also take issue with your notion that reality is compartmentalized in such a way that there are clear boundaries between educational disciplines. You would allow that something could be appropriate to teach in one discipline but should only be censored from study in particular disciplines. I think that reality is self-consistent, and thus that truths that arise in one discipline ought to be consistent with truths that arise in any other discipline. To the extent there appears to be a contradiction between the disciplines, it is appropriate for students to have some forum for resolving those contradictions. Your establishment of a Chinese wall between disciplines ensures that such questions of interdisciplinary contradictions can be examined in neither classroom.
Let me get this straight, you think that censorship of false ideas should be endorsed because otherwise people will come to believe that 2 + 2 = 5? And you think that this illustrates the silliness of the anti-censorship position?
The place where your argument falls down is that you beg the question. You assume that government must be the arbiter of truth and then claim that if government declares any false (or even questionable) idea as true, then it must present all false ideas as being true.
My position is that the problem arises only because of the view that the government is to be the arbiter of truth. Government sometimes censors facts (e.g. details of troop movements) because the knowledge of those facts presents a security risk, but government only censors ideas that it holds to be false. By far the greater threat to liberty is the censorship of ideas rather than the censorship of particular facts.
To me, there are two separate questions with Intelligent Design. The first is whether it is true, the second is whether it should be excluded by law from school curricula. I don't know if it is true, but I know that there are lots of systems that work well despite having no inherent designed-in goals (e.g. the free market). So I don't quite buy the premise that complex systematic behavior implies an intelligent design. On the other hand, usually when I see some world "from the outside" (a movie, a dream, a novel, a video game, etc.) I would be surprised to find that there was no underlying system that supported and governed the existence of that world (however undetectable that system was within the context of the world in question). So the evidence I have from example after example is that the parts of interacting systems can interact only because the are contained within and operate within some unifying system. Maybe the universe isn't like that, but if it isn't then it is unusual in that respect. If this principle is general, then I am led to think that underlying all is a base system that is a unity with no parts, and yet which can support the diversity of creation and which can manifest consciousness.
But the question of whether Intelligent Design is true is far different from the question of whether government should decide if it should be a part of the curriculum of schools. This issue only arises because the schools are government schools, but that just begs the question. I don't think that many people believe in freedom of expression and freedom of ideology because they think that all protected ideas are true. Rather I think that these protections are important because fundamental to democracy is the equal standing of individuals, based on whatever intellect and experience they have, to decide for themselves which ideas to accept. Governments never censor ideas they find to be harmless, thus the protections against censorship imply the right of people to hold and express ideas that the government finds to be harmful, including ideas that are found to be harmful because they are wrong.
Any loss of this protection will, of course, begin with the censorship of ideas that are most widely believed to be harmful, and which are held only by a few extremists. But it isn't really necessary to protect against ideas that aren't widely held, unless there is some compelling aspect of those ideas (such as their truth or their poetry or some other aspect) that would cause them to flourish, so the main effect of such censorship is to establish the principle under which censorship can extend to other areas where, apart from the censorship, there would be widespread debate and perhaps dialectic.
There is no greater threat to the freedom of ideas than the notion that the government should decide for us which ideas should be held and promulgated, and which ideas should not be. The public school system, by giving some ideas the imprimatur of government, and by effectively making other, opposing, ideas almost unthinkiable by the masses of people who are educated within those schools, is a grave threat to liberty.
The right way to oppose Intelligent Design is to present convincing arguments for alternative views, not to enlist government to dominate the intellectual lives of 90% of our children in such a way that arguments for Intelligent Design are excluded, a priori, by the design of the educational system.
> No, there aren't.
> Many writers choose to work in a carribean
> island. This has absolutely no effect on the
> way their books are protected in US (by US law)
> or EU (by EU directives or national law).
It is a reasonable point, but I am still not convinced.
Although it may be legitimate for MS to use plant location as a prod on this issue even apart from whether the location of the developers makes a difference (as when someone might refuse to do business with a store whose management supports a cause they don't like), I'll stick to the issue of whether it does make a difference.
Furthermore, I think that the ethics in this situation depend on MS's perception that they have a legitimate business reason to prefer to develop software where patent protection is available, it is legitimate to act in accord with one's beliefs about business success, even if those beliefs are wrong.
So it isn't enough to say that it doesn't matter, or even to prove that it doesn't matter. What counts is whether MS believes that it doesn't matter.
In any case, I think that your claim rests on a quirk of copyright law, which is that the entire matter being protected is publicly available and entails no base of knowledge or expertise that resides with the author alone, apart from the published material.
But copyright law alone cannot be the issue, because the EU does (AFAIK) allow software to be copyrighted. So I think the issue is the underlying knowledge and expertise rather than some published expression. I think that the issue is that MS wants to create a barrier to competition by protecting a body of expertise that it has allocated resources towards developing or otherwise acquiring. The protection could include a combination of copyright, patent, trade secret, and contract protections.
If MS spends $X to develop a body of expertise, that is then available to competitors at $0, then this clearly puts MS in a bad competitive position.
The protection doesn't have to be perfect, but it is better if it is more expensive to overcome. One way for another company to obtain the expertise might be to hire the developers. This could be an illegal strategy in areas where intellectual property is protected, and would likely be more expensive for others if it involved expatriation of the developers.
So I don't think that it is, in all cases, immaterial what the laws are where the software is developed.
In other cases, a complex interplay of the various protections could be involved. I am wondering if it might be the case that a software patent could be necessary, but not sufficient, to develop a complete competing product.
For example, a software patent could protect a way of delivering licensed media. The license to use the server software could include access to cryptographically secured and traceable keys, but could restrict trading those keys with areas that did not respect the patents. Media players worldwide might be able to play the media, but the content might, because of the restrictions on servers, have to originate in a nation that respected the patents. A knock-off system could exist in a country that did not respect the patents, but it wouldn't be able to deliver content worldwide, since it would exclude areas where the knock-off client software infringed the patents.
The point here is that the different components of intellectual property protection might work together to make knowledge of the algorithm less useful in areas where the license to the other components was unobtainable, and yet the patent protection could make license protection workable in other areas.
Seems like it is extortion, but only if it is illegal. Blackmail would have been the threat against Gates of revealing the extortion.
This is extortion in much the same way that if you get a better deal at store A than at store B, or if the manager at store B is rude to you, you might choose to buy from store A and you might remind the manager of store B that you have this power. Certainly it is using the power as a customer of your right to say no, but this may not be illegal, and therefore may not be extortion.
On the other hand, it may not have been a matter of retalliation at all. It may be that Microsoft was concerned that they would not own the intellectual property developed by Navision if those remained in Europe. There may be legitimate business reasons to develop intellectual property in those places where it is better protected.