Project of the Week: DM's iPhone Helper

Dungeon Masters, take heed:

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Copyleft books on Intellectual Property

Heads up: If you're at all interested in contemporary discussions of intellectual property, I have as many as three (3) fascinating books for you to download. Note that these links are to the content owners' websites.

Against Intellectual Monopoly is a biting criticism of the values in place behind IP law. It argues that our culture is inherently sharable, but that its channels have been hijacked. This one comes from a fairly radical standpoint, compared to most.

The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind comes at the problem from a more naturalist angle, tracing the origins of intellectual property from royal privilege grants to trade guilds to the founders of the US. It makes a number of solid, innovative arguments against the present brokenness of the system.

FREE CULTURE is, to my knowledge, the most authoritative IP reformist document existing. While Lawrence Lessig is not the most progressive of the group (left of center and strongly in favor of fair use protections, though in favor of keeping protections on the books), he does attack the problem with as much depth as has been plumbed for the layperson.

The law may not be on our side, but these books prove that the great minds are. Download and tell your friends.

These letters are free

I think:

1. Information, because it does not exist in the same way physical objects do, cannot be owned the way physical objects are. A disk can be owned, a song cannot. A book can be owned, a sequence of words cannot.

2. The idea that we have constructed a practical system to encourage innovation by assigning property rights to data as though it were an object is poorly executed and irresponsible, and does more harm than good.

3. Allowing society to determine how to best reward the creation of culture would be more desirable than our current application of law to create a 'market' of ideas that is artificially propped up and enforced.

4. Someday we will collectively realize 1, 2, and 3, and abandon our attempt to assign rights to intangibles. This will not stifle the production and accumulation of culture.

The idea that culture will not be produced without patents and copyrights is preposterous. Instead, ideas will be shared, reviewed, and distributed more (not freely, but more commonly) when they are free of these contrived laws.