Alan wrote:
'And really, “something valuable acquired for nothing, without the consent of the giver” is the basic legal and moral definition of theft.'
Well, I agree it has some remarkable affinities with theft, and that's the reason why the law currently treats ideas, patterns etc. as if they were “property” that can be stolen. But I think the time has come to re-think the law in this area. To put it in a single sentence, I think the law should respect and protect the authorship of ideas, rather than the supposed “ownership” of ideas. To treat authorship as if it were ownership is a conceptual mistake that does more harm than good.
Unlike real estate, money, or other things that can be owned, an idea or pattern is a “type” of which there can be indefinitely many “tokens”. If these tokens can be replicated easily at negligible cost, as has now happened with all writing, photographs, music, computer code, etc., what matters is the link between the author and what he creates (i.e. the “type”) rather than the physical embodiment of the creation itself (i.e. the “token”).
If a musician writes a tune, someone else can hear it and whistle the tune. It would be ridiculous for the musician to have any sort of power to prevent someone else whistling it. The ease of computer replication is increasingly making many other kinds of patterns just like a tune that anyone can whistle.
Although some people will not welcome that, and it will definitely change lives and professions, overall it may be a good thing.
There are all sorts of ways in which the supposed “ownership” of ideas harms education. For example, academics routinely re-cycle their own writing (or occasionally someone else's writing) and then, under the guise of “owning” the copyright to what they have written, in effect prevent people from reading it and judging it on its merits (or demerits). It goes into a journal that only a university library can afford to “buy”, and a handful of people at most read it or discuss its contents. Next, the “owner” of these supposedly “original ideas” (translation: unchecked ideas) presents an academic selection committee with all the “real estate” he has produced over the course of his career, as if this “real estate” were original thought. That sort of thing has to end. It's dishonest. People who want to be read know how to make their writing easily available to anyone who wants to read it. We are really very lucky to live in an age in which that has become a reality, at last.
By treating writing as something that can be owned, our antiquated laws give rise to some unsavoury types of business. For example, a writer's grandson can “own” his grandfather's writings, for no good reason other than an accident of birth. Then he can block scholarship and make a profit at the same time by judiciously “paying out” quotation rights. Until, suddenly, 70 years after the writer's death, the public “owns” it instead. That sort of thing strikes me as unacceptably anachronistic.
As an alternative to all that, I would suggest arrangements in which the “link” between the writer and the writer's work (i.e. the idea or pattern he has created, a “type” rather than a “token”) becomes progressively more distant over the course of time and repeated replication, rather than being an exchangeable commodity that suddenly disappears at some arbitrary moment.
