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Re: [ox-en] Re: Property, scarcity, selbstentfaltung



Hi MJ,

On Sun, 9 Feb 2003, MJ Ray wrote:
It merely tries to use them in a particular way, to try to encourage
progress in programming, like most copyright laws were intended to do for
creativity.


This is a complete sidetrack from the main argument... but copyright laws
have never truly been intended to encourage creativity. This is John
Milton writing in 1644 about an early attempt to establish combined
copyright/censorship laws (well before the first true copyright law, the
act of Queen Anne):

"It may be doubted there was in it the fraud of some old patentees and
monopolizers in the trade of book-selling; who under pretence of the poor
in their Company not to be defrauded, and the just retaining of each man
his severall copy, which God forbid should be gainsaid, brought divers
glosing colours to the House, which were indeed but colours, and serving
no end except it be to exercise a superiority over their neighbours, men
who doe not therefore labour in an honest profession to which learning is
indetted..."

and:

"Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopoliz'd and
traded in by tickets and statutes, and standards. We must not think to
make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the Land, to mark and
licence it like our broad cloath and our wooll packs."

When the actual act of Queen Anne (from which all modern anglo-saxon
copyright law comes) it was blatant that it was in the interest of the
booksellers, not the creativity of the authors, and all the copyright
court cases of the next century proved it.

That's all... just wanted an excuse to quote Milton ;-) (and counter the
idea that the purpose of copyright was ever really to encourage
creativity)

Graham


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