|
| quote: | Originally posted by RJT
Just like Plato's defintion of "knowledge," the ability to prove the creation of an IP, or rather, the debate regarding whether or not this is even possible to prove, will more than likely be a mystery that I'll puzzle over forever.
My gut feeling says that in the strictest sense, it's impossible - Though this raises all sorts of question about the idea of proving "innovation" or "pioneering" something new. I think we can arguably point to people who have clearly done "new" things in our eyes, how do we prove that they were beyond a shadow of a doubt the first to do so?
Gah - So many questions leading to so few answers! |
"But the distinction between creation and discovery is not clearcut or rigorous. Nor is it clear why such a distinction, even if clear, is ethically relevant in defining property rights. No one creates matter; they just manipulate and grapple with it according to physical laws. In this sense, no one really creates anything. They merely rearrange matter into new arrangements and patterns. An engineer who invents a new mousetrap has rearranged existing parts to provide a function not previously performed. Others who learn of this new arrangement can now also make an improved mousetrap. Yet the mousetrap merely follows laws of nature. The inventor did not invent the matter out of which the mousetrap is made, nor the facts and laws exploited to make it work. Similarly, Einstein’s “discovery” of the relation E=mc2, once known by others, allows them to manipulate matter in a more efficient way. Without Einstein’s, or the inventor’s, efforts, others would have been ignorant of certain causal laws, of ways matter can be manipulated and utilized. Both the inventor and the theoretical scientist engage in creative mental effort to produce useful, new ideas. Yet one is rewarded, and the other is not. In one recent case, the inventor of a new way to calculate a number representing the shortest path between two points—an extremely useful technique—was not given patent protection because this was “merely” a mathematical algorithm. But it is arbitrary and unfair to reward more practical inventors and entertainment providers, such as the engineer and songwriter, and to leave more theoretical science and math researchers and philosophers unrewarded. The distinction is inherently vague, arbitrary, and unjust."
from Stephan Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property"
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
Last edited by SMC on Oct-17-2006 at 22:23
|
