(Preparing for the impending closure of E2.)

You have thoughts in your head. You don't know/care where they came from. When you try to express or apply that thought, others come and force you to stop. These thoughts in your head that you once thought were yours are no longer considered your own. You have no right to them. They have been stolen.

Patent and copyright laws are centrally planned ("central" in the sense that the agencies involved consider themselves representative of every thinking person), as is enforcement of these laws - which also require the collection of taxes (and a drain on the economy) to fund such enforcement and propaganda.

The reason these laws came into existence was to encourage the spread of new ideas. While these laws may help the creation of new ideas, they hinder the application of these new ideas, because only a limited number of people will be allowed to make use of these ideas.

Nations without intellectual property laws have a distinct advantage in that they can make free use of the ideas copied from other countries without restriction - whereas only a subset of the population in the country from which the idea originated can take advantage of it.

How does a nation in isolation create the incentive to generate new ideas? If it's material incentive they're after, the resources freed up by no longer having to create, interpret, enforce, and litigate these laws can be used to reward these ideas. Alternatively, the nation could resort to psychological incentives by consulting their psychologists, sociologists, and the E2 Voting/Experience System.


See also texty's node on intellectual property (replicated without mutation or permission):

Something I have my doubts about. Ideas are information, and as Daniel Dennett put it (in the pretensiously titled Consciousness Explained):

Information is the one commodity that can be given away and kept at the same time.

This means that `stealing someone's idea` is very different from `stealing someone's car`. Of course, it is't as simple as that. Worth thinking about though. I think this issue will become more and more central as computers and software become more central.

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