jf_avon@citenet.net wrote:
With patents, there is a problem of large companies owning them yet oing nothing with them except suing other companies or individuals.
If you reject that possibility, you imply that the result of your work for yourself might not be your own property. It does not matter if the idea patented was originated be the patent holder of was purchased by the patent holder. Money is equivalent to personnal work.
Bullshit. Corporations do not work; their employees do. The creativity of employees is sat upon as net worth, but nothing is produced. Money is only worth something if it is circulating in an economy; a corporation only has worth if it produces something. Instead corporations produce nothing. They sit on resources, preventing anyone else from producing, because the current system favors non-production and an inflationary and wasteful economy based on speculation. Economic equivalent of people who sit around and talk but don't get off their asses and do something.
And the property rights *are* fundamentals (even if not
No, they are not fundamental anything. They are taken for granted in the modern West as a rationale. It's a nice one, and I don't have too many arguments... except when people claim a false dilemma of either total private property or total socialism. Why not a form of property based on use? If you don't use your property, after a while you cease owning it. It was originally a rationale in Europe and early American colonies because so many people claimed to own land that they never saw, despire the fact that natives and settlers lived there. Extended to patents... corporations do a lot of R but no D, but legally no one else can make use of it either. Unisys didn't market LZW compression and let everyone else use it... then they decided they should have been making losts of mulah and wanted to pull the plug and get royalities. IBM has done negligable production on arithmetic coding, so a lot of independ developers ignore the patents. Similar arguments can be made about PK crypto.
You can not have your cake and eat it too...
Huh? What does that have to do with this argument?