One of my law professors, on the first day of class, made a very interesting comment pertaining to IP. She said that she does not allow any voice recording technology in her class.
When someone meekly asked why she has something against them, she responded, “Because my words and my thoughts are my Intellectual Property, and I don’t want them reproduced or exploited without my consent.”
Well, her thoughts must be pretty damn valuable cause I’m paying out the ass for them, especially to not have full “ownership” of them.
It’d be funny if you secretly taped her and put the tapes out on bittorrent. “Share” her thoughts with others.
Tell her she doesn’t have a monopoly on a land of imagination and that her thoughts are not “created” by her, but instead they are “synthesized” by her. They are combinations of all of the other people’s thoughts that she has come across and put preferences on. If she didn’t own them, as the original authors presumably would, then her profiting off of them is illegal. And if you don’t own her thoughts because you pay for the class, then she doesn’t own her teachers thoughts and is profiting off of them. Education is void!!
The difference in pirating and sharing is that pirating is taking other people’s things, then profiting off of them. Sharing doesn’t allow you to profit off of the distribution of others work.
I think people forget that communication is solely and only a copy function. Thinking as someone else said is a synthesis function, but eveyone in the room is making copies eithery by remembering what she said or by taking notes.
The problem with brain to brain communication is one of fidelity. Where an audio recording can faithfully reproduce what she said, we can never be sure that the content of a mind that hears it matches precisely the content of the mind that said it.
Your professor sounds like a jackass. Besides I, Pencil, there’s another really great piece by Leonard Read called The Free Market and It’s Enemy that I feel also tackles IP, especially on the section Who Invented the Jet? To toot my own whistle, so to speak, here’s something I wrote 2 years ago on thoughts and ideas sort of in the vein of I, Pencil.
we can go to the left side of this and demand the government provide each person in the class with a audio, video, and transcript of the class. demand each class be open school.
