“I hereby patent red. The very idea of a red object belongs to me. All royalties payable to Clayton Inc. 10239 Old World Rd. 00385”
The problem is that the human concept of ownership regards rights to exclusive use of specific objects, whereas patents and copyrights grant “property” rights to entire classes of objects. “You may purchase this clock and thereby own the right to hang it on your wall and look at it, but you may not under any circumstances disassemble it, reverse-engineer its mechanism and manufacture a clock operating on the same principle, whether of your own design or not.” That’s the effective meaning of patent. What an absurdity. You sell an object but its disassembly, reverse-engineering and copying is prohibited??
This makes no sense whatsoever in terms of the basic conception of what ownership means. It is a bastardization of the human concept of property and ownership. The owner of a patent or copyright is implicitly claiming a kind of property right in every burnable DVD (you can purchase this blank DVD but you may not burn this pattern upon it), every piece of steel (you can purchase this piece of steel, but you may not fabricate it into any of these patented shapes), and so on and so on. Such ownership rights are ridiculous.
Clayton -