Read Chapter 3 "Against Intellectual Property" of the Brian Martin's book. Write a blog review (especially, comment on his strategies for change).
I totally agree with the author. While reading the story I automatically remembered a case where a cat owner wanted to dry her cat (or was it hamster?) in a microwave and sued the company for not having information about drying hamsters in a microwave oven after the animal had died
There is an illustrative joke about hamsters:
Q: Why shouldn't I dry my hamster in a microwave?
A: Because the dryer is the proper place to dry a hamster. Toss him in with a dryer sheet and he'll come out all fluffy and warm. Hell, he'll even smell good for a day or two.
I think in this case the owner should be sued, not the microwave oven company.
The next trivial example is how a woman burnt her mouth with hot coffee in MacDonald's.
Perhaps this is somehow connected to my previous Law and Ethics post's death test example?
I gave the two examples to show just how greedy people can be. I think patents are a metaphor of greed, because these people who patent things (that may not originally be theirs) for malicious purposes (e.g. taking the rights of growing and using some kind of tea away from people who have grown tea for ages), and those people simply seem to be afraid.
I agree that when the new ideas concern direct help to underprivileged, they should be available the sooner the better. While reading the text about the part I just mentioned, I could not help but think of this year's fuss about swine flu. Is it a case of pharmaceutical companies trying to sell their medicines? Why does not anyone talk about the usual flu which also kills people when left untreated? Maybe a company who has produced and patented the medicines wants the fuss to be around in order to gain profit from the medicines... maybe, we do not know.
When I read about the strategies for change, I found some controversies. Changing of thought can initially be a noble idea, but it takes a lot of time to change the understanding of masses. Not all of us can and will change their idea of proprietary work, ideas, etc. This takes a whole lot of time when this takes place. The idea itself is of course positive, I agree that people should change their way of thinking about different ideas.
The author somehow leads people to protest against copyright, not to go with the flow but try to act differently. As I have read before, Linus Torvalds was among the first to show the benefit of open source, which led to a powerful operation system with the help of the ideas of other people. He is a good example of letting other ideas become a profit to his initial work. I think for wise people copyright is not a restriction, they still find a way to obtain the works and read/use/develop them.
I would like to finish the topic with a small example of my view of piracy and copyright/patents. I really like listening to music. Getting it online is much faster and easier than buying it from a music shop/internet music shop. After obtaining the the pieces of music, I decide whether I like them or not, and based on my opinion, I will go and buy my favourite CD-s, because then I will have their songs even when my computer hard disk dies. The ones I do not like are not listened to anyway, so I do not see any harm in such action. I have lots of CD-s of my favourite band at home, because I like to support them by showing my appreciation and contributing to their songwriting.
No comments:
Post a Comment