From: nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 08:26:52 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: patents suck
Message-ID: <199602182353.AAA07801@utopia.hacktic.nl>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


jf_avon@citenet.net wrote:

>>With patents, there is a problem of large companies owning them 
>>yet oing nothing with them except suing other companies or
>>individuals.

>If you reject that possibility, you imply that the result of
>your work for yourself might not be your own property.  It does
>not matter if the idea patented was originated be the patent
>holder of was purchased by the patent holder.  Money is
>equivalent to personnal work.

Bullshit. Corporations do not work; their employees do. The
creativity of employees is sat upon as net worth, but nothing
is produced.  Money is only worth something if it is circulating
in an economy; a corporation only has worth if it produces
something.

Instead corporations produce nothing.  They sit on resources,
preventing anyone else from producing, because the current system
favors non-production and an inflationary and wasteful economy
based on speculation.

Economic equivalent of people who sit around and talk but don't
get off their asses and do something.

>And the property rights *are* fundamentals (even if not

No, they are not fundamental anything. They are taken for granted
in the modern West as a rationale. It's a nice one, and I don't
have too many arguments... except when people claim a false
dilemma of either total private property or total socialism.

Why not a form of property based on use?  If you don't use your
property, after a while you cease owning it.  It was originally
a rationale in Europe and early American colonies because so
many people claimed to own land that they never saw, despire the
fact that natives and settlers lived there.

Extended to patents... corporations do a lot of R but no D, but
legally no one else can make use of it either.  Unisys didn't
market LZW compression and let everyone else use it... then they
decided they should have been making losts of mulah and wanted
to pull the plug and get royalities.  IBM has done negligable
production on arithmetic coding, so a lot of independ developers
ignore the patents.  Similar arguments can be made about PK
crypto.


>You can not have your cake and eat it too...

Huh? What does that have to do with this argument?