If only the likes of Tom were alive in America today. We have so shamed our
modern intellects for private greed...
DJ
Negativland
>
>On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, "Bob Kohn" <bobATemusic.com> wrote:
>
>> Charles,
>>
>> All property rights are merely legal relations between and among
>> individuals, whether the object of the right is a piece of land, a pound of
>> butter, or the privilege to sing a song in a public place. (An analog to
>> "fair use" with respect to real property might be an "easement.")
>
>All rights, period, are merely legal relations between and among
>individuals. It shouldn't be surprising that this is true of property
>rights, both physical and intellectual.
>
>> I don't see much difference between property rights in physical
>> objects and those in concepts such as a song, except that we limit
>> the duration of the right in the latter and don't in the former.
>
>Intellectual property rights are a much newer innovation than physical
>property rights. They're also more limited in US law, because the
>Constitutional framers understood that ideas do not behave the same as
>things, and should not be treated in the same way:
>
> "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all
> others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking
> power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively
> possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it
> is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone,
> and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar
> character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because
> every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea
> from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine;
> as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without
> darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to
> another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction
> of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been
> peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made
> them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening
> their density at any point, and like the air in which we
> breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of
> confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then
> cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
>
> --Thomas Jefferson
>
>-S
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