Re: thought for the week

On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, Tim Phillips <hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> wrote:
>
> A world of copyright is like a world in which,
> when I buy a tomato, I may eat the tomato, but
> I may not plant its seeds and grow my own tomatoes
> for market.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one, Tim, for several reasons.

If you return to the core rationale of copyright, it is there for the dissemination of knowledge and the encouragement of creativity. This is certainly true if you examine the Constitutional Clause on which modern copyright in the US is based. You are confusing this and the view of copyright maximalists who would _like_ copyright to be like this. If you're trying to analogise with the tomato, then it would involve the seeds being the idea behind the copyright work, and I would have thought that the whole purpose is so that others can go away, use these seeds and grow their own tomatoes. The books currently protected by copyright law have themselves taken ideas or inspiration from the books that came before them, and future books will be inspired by these books, too (remembering that it is the expression and not the idea that is protected).

Secondly, IMHO it is erroneous to try to analogise copyright with tomatoes -- whereas a copyrighted work is intangible and still exists after someone has used it, once someone eats a tomato, that tomato is then not available for someone else to eat. This is the underlying problem involved where there is an attempt to analogise intellectual property with real property or personal property.

Ewan Kirk
<Ewan.J.Kirk[_at_]solent.ac.uk> Received on Thu Jul 22 1999 - 09:23:21 GMT