Re: Constitutional Challenge to (C) Code

On 30/03/98, Amy Stoller <redherring[_at_]tuna.net> wrote:
>
> I hope it is not your position that creators and owners of
> intellectual property should be unable to leave anything of value to
> their spouses and children, or that their heirs should have to endure
> without remedy uses of their spouses or parents' life work which are
> repugnant to them.

It's difficult, at times, to restrain one's initial staggered incredulity and to respond dispassionately to rhetoric like this. Suffice to say, it must be recognised in any sensible debate that the very idea that "creators" are owners with rights to control use is, especially under the US Constitution, a _highly_ contentious one.

I find the idea that it might be legitimate to claim originality, let alone rights to exclusivity, in any appropriation and re-jigging of public-domain words, concepts, methods of expression, algorithms, melodies or symbols (unless perhaps one has been born and raised in complete, memetically sterile isolation from the culture) a very dangerous one indeed.

And the idea that one should be free to pass one's (legitimated) plunder on to one's offspring is not only repugnant but mindboggling.

CYa,
JEREMY Jeremy G. Byrne
<jeremy[_at_]iz.org> Received on Tue Mar 31 1998 - 12:11:43 GMT