[Ecommerce] Re: [Broadcast-discuss] CPTech is looking for cool quotes

[Seth Johnson]

Let me be the first on this one . . .

"It would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to
inventors... It would be curious... if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of
an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and
stable property. 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 every one, 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 in 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. Society may give an exclusive
right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue
ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according
to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from
anybody... The exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right,
but for the benefit of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson,
1813. ME 13:333


Manon Anne Ress wrote:
>
> CPTech is looking for cool quotes regarding trademarks, copyright,
> related rights, patent, TK, GR, Folklore, data, trade secret, public
> domain etc...
> Send us your favorite (with attribution), if you're the first one to
> send it and you're lucky you'll get a prize!
> Manon
>
> Please send to:
> Joy.spencer@cptech.org
> mpalmedo@cptech.org
> manon.ress@cptech.org
> james.love@cptech.org
>
> --
> Manon Anne Ress
> Consumer Project on Technology
> www.cptech.org
> PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
> manon.ress@cptech.org, voice: 1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176
> _______________________________________________
> Broadcast-discuss mailing list
> Broadcast-discuss@lists.essential.org
> http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/broadcast-discuss

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