on 9/5/01 9:50 PM, eric engle at engleerica_at_yahoo.com wrote:
> Anyway copyright is now: Lifetime of the author plus
> seventy five years. Patent has also increased.
>
> Course this is all to benefit the totality of
> humanity. Not.
Sorry to go OT on this, but this is an area that is so misrepresented.
Patent laws for medicine is much shorter. Why? for the "benefit" of mankind.
Look at what has happened since this new law. Cost of medicine has gone up.
Why? Because companies that have to spend fortunes on developing new
medicine have to recoup that investment in a scant 10 years. In order to do
so, they must charge exhorbitant rates during that 10 years. To make it more
insidious, in order to assure themselves of this profit, they concentrate on
those products they think will best return that investment in that short
time. In other words, they develop what they know will work, not what is
most needed long term. You may castigate them for doing this, and for "not
thinking about humanity" but this is a fact of life. If you were in their
shoes, you just might do what they are doing. We do live, after all, in a
world that uses money to make everything work.
This is the fruit of short-sighted politicians and special interest groups
meddling with the simple natural working of economy. The market place is too
vastly complicated for beaurocrats, or any group to truly control. In other
words, there is no pie in this sky, no pot at the end of this rainbow. Every
manipulative practice that is intended to "help" the economy or "humankind"
always, always has negative consequences further down the road. To put it
bluntly, meddling always makes things worse. Better to leave it alone.
Copyright and patent laws exist for the same reason laws exist to protect
tangible property. To say that "propietary information" sucks is the exactly
the same thing as saying the private property sucks. This, is communism,
plain and simple. Intellectual property communism. Wonderful ring to it, eh?
Like the original poster, don't get me going on this. I have a lot of places
I could take you where intellectual property has no value. Trust me, you
don't want to live there...
-- -Jon Glass Krakow, Poland <mailto:jonglass_at_usa.net> <mailto:glasshaus5_at_aol.com>-- This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Oct 03 2001 - 12:01:18 EDT