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Re: [ox-en] positive intellectual rights



On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, Stefan Merten wrote:


Last week (11 days ago) Graham Seaman wrote:
Phillippe Aigrain has an excellent article on 'positive intellectual
rights' (well, maybe it's old news, but I hadn't seen it before):
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/aigrain.pdf

I speed-read it. It's indeed an interesting paper. Also interesting
seems the background of the author:

  Philippe Aigrain is Head of Sector "Software Technologies" in the
  unit "Technologies and Engineering for Software, Systems and
  Services" of the European Commission Information Society
  Technologies R&D Programme, in which he is in charge of actions in
  support to free / open source software and related innovation.

That's an example for someone who is "infected" by the idea of Free
Software bringing the idea to bodies which are far from being
"natural" allies of the Free Software movement.

I think he's achieved quite a lot (though I of course I don't know how
much is just him personally). There is an EEC funding programme for free
software, and a (fairly quiet, but often interesting) mailing list to
discuss it:
http://mail.conecta.it/mailman/listinfo/freesw 



<snip>

There is another list I find worth reproducing here.


[Aigrain] 
  But before we define property rights and other restrictions, it is
  better to fully explore mentally what can develop on the basis of
  positive rights.

  To outline this potential, one will have to differentiate between
  different types of intellectual entities. Here are some of the
  essential parameters that influence which positive rights or
  property-based scheme can be deployed:

  C1. The size of the initial investment necessary to create an
      intellectual entity before it can first be used or accessed.

I didn't want to bring this up before, because I thought it was picky when
the rest of his essay was so good, but I think this is the worst point in
the whole thing. IMO monetary costs should have nothing to do with rights.

The classic argument for proprietary ownership is always cost of 
investment; but costs published are usually almost totally fictitious
(because companies have incentives to inflate them for tax purposes; 
because they include foregone returns on capital used for development, 
which has nothing to do with the development cost itself, etc.). 

Even if the published costs were accurate, they would still be irrelevant
- just because it cost Microsoft several billion dollars to develop 
Windows, is no reason why they should have more rights than Linux 
developers.

Financial costs and rights should not have any relation to one another.
Cost in terms of amount of work done, maybe, but I'm still not sure.

Graham



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