Re: Not "Satanism;" realism.

[Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>]

At 01:45 AM 1/2/99 -0500, stan johnson wrote:
 
>But the   
>overall advance of the society is not well served if that extends to   
>extorting maximal wealth and retaining the knowledge as proprietary.   
>The artist who exhibits his or her work, thus allowing others to learn   
>from it and apply insights in their own work, contributes much more   
>than the artist who locks his or her work up in a vault, keeping it   
>'proprietary', so that no-one else can learn from it. 

Not a good analogy to the issue at hand. We're not talking about
"learning from" the work, but rather copying it exactly or creating 
a directly derivative work. 

Your logic is also flawed in another way. Would you advocate making it 
illegal to keep a piece of art that one created to oneself if one
so chose? By your logic, doing otherwise would be wrong, because
society would not be "well served."

>And regardless of the wishes of would-be entrepreneurs, society is   
>under no obligation to grant them a means by which they may profit at   
>the cost of loss to the society as a whole. 

I see. By this logic, no one should own property, either, because 
this deprives "society as a whole" of the use of it.

--Brett