!@!Re: !@!Re: [Upd-discuss] Did You Say "Intellectual Property"? It's a Seductive Mirage by Richard M. Stallman

[Michael Hart]

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, Adam Moran wrote:

> Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>> The term "exclusive rights" avoids the bias of the term "intellectual
>> property", but shares its confusion.  It focuses attention on the
>> _form_ which is common to laws such as copyright, patents, and
>> trademarks, and away from their _substance_, in which they are
>> completely different.  This is not conducive to clear thinking about
>> any one of these laws.
>
> I recognise an ontology, which I would tend to label as atomistic [1]
>
>  "Knowledge is never created in a vacuum. Hiding the raw data or prior
>   sources of research is either hiding plagiarism or preventing others
>   from verifying, duplicating, or improving on the knowledge
>   (freedom 1)"

Sometimes the previous knoweldge used is so general that not citing
it is just the opposite of "hiding plagiarism or preventing others
from verifying, duplicating, or improving on the knowledge."

Gutenberg's Press is a good example.


[snip]


> On that note I quote *Time Machines and the Constitutions of the Globe*
> [4].
>
> I was taken by this paragraph:
>
>  "It is in this context that Galison argues that Einstein's 1905
>   article *On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies* [5], 'the best
>   known physics paper of the twentieth century', bears the imprint of
>   this crossroads between science and legal literature. It is 'a
>   scientific paper written in the form and rigour of a patent
>   application'. Galison notes that 'it has long struck scholars that
>   the style (of the paper ) .. does not even look like an ordinary
>   physics paper. There are essentially no footnotes to other authors'
>   ... by contrast typical 'physics articles were filled with references
>   to other papers; Einstein's article does not fit this mold'"
>
> Shame really.
>
> No doubt it would have served as a better learning artifact if the
> sources were referenced. But all the same, an understandable form of
> documentation, given Einstein's position and drive.
>
> This paper, amongst others, enabled Einstein to trade on his specialist
> knowledge, his patent so to speak, and benefit from being at the
> pinnacle of a self-created academic pyramid scheme, Cf [6].


More than "understandable". . . .

Einstein was in his early twenties when he was coming up with these,
and working in the Swiss Patent Office, and had been bascially tossed
out of academia, so what else could you expect him to do other than:

"to trade on his specialist knowledge, his *patent* so to speak,
and benefit from being at the pinnacle of a *self-created academic pyramid*?

If they throw you out of academia, for whatever reason [remember Newton was
evicted from Cambridge due to the plague and working at home when he came up
with his seminal ideas and wrote his first great works], if you wish to keep
going in the *academic pyramid* you pretty much have to *self-create* one
of your own.  Even if you leave the *academic pyramid scheme* yourself. . . .

If you "think outside the box" it often includes "being outside the box."


;-)



Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg