Mind building on culture |
Thursday, 27 April 2006 | |
To what extent can ideas be owned and exploited by individuals?
"No one can do to Disney, Inc. what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm"A comment from Lawrence Lessig at OSCOM 2002 on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (aka Mickey Mouse Protection Act) shows the irrationality of protecting new ideas when they are based on past ideas. What is worse is the fact that there are no ideas that appear from nowhere, without any relation with thoughts done by others in the past. It is well know the quotation from Isaac Newton about the shoulders of giants. What is not so well known is the sociobiological nature of the human mind. We are what we are because we grow our minds upon the ideas of our ancestors. Following the policy of GNU or Creative Commons licenses, new ideas should be public domain as they are necessarily based on former ideas implicitly released under these principles. So there is no biological possibility of having ownership of ideas. Don't think of making money from your ideas, think of being a giant !
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 18 November 2007 ) |
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