Against intellectual property

danny.oz.au

9 points·mlLK··4 comments

There is also a good book of the same name:

http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Property-P523.as...

...as well as the more in-depth, similarly-titled and themed Against Intellectual Monopoly:

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

Those inclined to opt out of the copyright game, put your code where your mouth is and release your next software project using this:

http://unlicense.org/

Lest the author be considered hypocritical, the aforementioned book is freely available as a PDF:

http://mises.org/books/against.pdf

It's a bit misleading to say the unlicence is an opt-out of the copyright game. The Public Domain is a complicated area, particularly internationally and you may not be allowed to opt-out in this way.

What exactly is being gained over BSD or Apache 2.0 licence to compensate for this risk?

And since "intellectual property" extends to more than copyright, how does this impact on patents etc.

Finally, if you're allowing others to come along and combine your work with their and then patent and copyright the result, it's not really an effective protest "against intellectual property" is it?

This is all covered in the article itself.

Robert Laughlin's The Crime of Reason and the Closing of the Scientific Mind, Basic Books, 2008 is a interesting and provocative examination of the issue of intellectual property and how it interacts with free market ideas. The key question is "what can be owned?".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com