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Thanks for an informative post, but this bit is a little irritating: " ... While many people blindly agree with this justification for IP laws, it's worth ment

Thanks for an informative post, but this bit is a little irritating: " ... While many people blindly agree with this justification for IP laws, it's worth mentioning that many disagree, ..." Would you also agree that many people agree with the justification and many people blindly disagree with it? Or is anyone who agrees necessarily blind and all who disagree farsighted?

jaekwon 13y ago
Oops you're right! Of course there are intelligent justifications for IP. Blindness goes both ways.
- mpyne 13y ago
  One major unintended consequence of strong IP is that it provides the backbone behind copyleft projects like GNU. With weak IP it would be as if all software had BSD-alike licenses. To give people the freedom to have the source to the software that drives their essential computing gear requires some type of strong IP regime to enforce the requirement to share-alike. As technology becomes more important, the availability of source code correspondingly becomes more important. Right now there's a fairly strong social pressure to open the source, but it won't always have to be that way either.