Protecting Design

Re: [spiers] Protecting Design

Jonh and readers,

Your email about this subject of IP rights is great and following are my
comments:
>Usually what motivates someone to introduce something new is the thing
itself, to be
>introduced. And the person who does the introduction is someone with a
passion for the
>introduction.
>Now the argument will be as the 'inventor' of the item, I should be given
some royalty on every >unit that sells whether or not I am ever
involved. There is nothing in natural law to support >this argument, so it
had to be developed in prescriptive law. Well, in fact this is a secondary
>reason, the primary reason for intellectual property is without it, no one
would bother ever >developing anything new and useful. Of course, this is
sheer nonsense. People develop the >new and different constantly without
any thought of downstream gain. In fact, there are >plenty of people who
develop useful items specifically assuring they will not get downstream
>gain. In the software industry alone, there is "Eric Allman, author of
SendMail, the program >that delivers your words over the wires.. Larry Wall
wrote Perl, the freeware used to organize >Web sites... Brian Behlendorf
created Apache, the program that serves up Web pages on >demand; Paul Vixie
...wrote Bind, the program that translates words into numbers, letting us
>type www.sfgate.com instead of the string of numbers that really
constitutes a Web
>address." (thanks to SFGate for that riff) all of these people developed
these items for free >and gave them away. Cuz they like it.

All these inventors you mentioned are inventors of Linux development, which
went through a quite a political technical turmoil because they were taken
for the ride by the riders (cowboys) and left them out of the financial
gains. Initial inventor was guy from Sweden name Linux (Sp?) and Berkeley
guy who invented BSD and all these software you had mentioned were free
contributions by other inventors, hoping that their invention would stay out
of the conservators who financially benefited from someone else's efforts
i.e. inventors. Out of Linux, came Redhat and others who were basically the
financial beneficiaries from the efforts of the real inventors, it started
out as "Cuz they like it" and realized later how they were been taken for a
ride, they revolted, but it was too late, train already hit the rock and
crashed…..

I think inventors do invent for return for their efforts and not "Cuz they
like it", especially in today's times. During late 70's when inventor were
creating, the mind set of inventor was "Cuz they like it", later it was
realized that it was about someone else's ideas to make money, inventors
start looking at IP rights, modeling after the leader of the pack Chairman
Gates.

grp

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