L. Neil Smith,
It has recently come to my attention that you have benefited from the fruits of my mental labor without compensation or as much as an acknowledgement of credit. I present you with clear evidence that I was the first to publicly identify two spelling mistakes in a paragraph of your text (I didn't bother going beyond that one paragraph), highlighting those errors in red in a related but distinct forum conversation on the following URL:
http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.php?topic=34318.msg606312#msg606312
Archiving Internet engines like those employed by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and dozens of other neutral Web-crawling entities large and small can be used to verify the timestamps of the events occurred, and there is every reason to believe that your subsequent modification of your text was a direct consequence of my effort. According to your own philosophy, the "little bits of my life" that I've spent remembering German vs Yiddish surname translation trends and mediocre Babylon-5 novelizations are my "sweat equity", which means that force or social pressure can be employed to create an environment of artificial scarcity so that I could profit from my ideas. My "moral burden" of upholding "my" "intellectual" "property" "rights" shall be fulfilled!
I am blind-copying this message to my posse of rowdy AnCap Internet trolls, Free Staters, fan-fic writers, Somali pirates, Swedish pirates, fat bearded UNIX administrators, and the A-Team!
Or ... (here's the point where this e-mail turns serious) ... we could just agree to abandon this silly pettiness, and let our obvious ideas transfer on the basis of utility, confident in the fact that, if need be, ever-advancing information technology makes it ever-easier to trace ideas back to their point of origin.
I am a capitalist, and I believe that a person's "capital" includes all aspects of his self-ownership - body, mind, time, skills, health, reputation, material assets, contractual assets, parents' rights, and so on. We use money as a means of material exchange, but we must realize that there are things money can't buy - genuine love, youth, career competence, academic accomplishment, freedom from some consequences of one's actions, and so on. Intellectual property is an immaterial asset - you can prove that you wrote something and published it at a particular time, and a rational society would recognize and value that to some degree. The value of your IP can be measured in the number of people quoting / applying it, the number of people visiting your Web-site as the result, your prestige in certain intellectual circles, and so on.
There's more to capitalism than just simply money! A lot more!
Best regards, Alex Libman |