operationally effective?? i am not sure.

cable boxes used to go back to cable companies i suppose computers couild have done the same thing.

if you consider eating and breathing the cost of brain function – ideas – then they arent exactly free.

but brains dont function without eating and breathing. no additional coast may be more appropriate.

do they require physical things too??

farting is action. does a contract require more?

does a private system have laws?

or a poor choice of words. if ip is just used to refer to current copyright and patent and trademarks systems the it is two letters used to describe many similar things. i thought i had read somethign about some homesteading crap the kinsella had mentioned but i cant remember. if he alone uses the term ip maybe that was why.

what trap??

why call it intellectual property in the first place then??? why use the term if you didnt intend to confuse or deceive???

i suppose you can go around quoting books of shakespeare.

would ideas aren’t free. be wrong too??

outside of scriptural doctrines property is some type of social ‘ought’????

maybe he is being deliberatly deceptive or misleading in using the term property coupled with intellectual endeavors…i dont know.

Michael,Well said.One’s artistic creations are an extension of one’s personal identity and brand. If anyone can put my name — established in the marketplace as a novelist — on their own amateurish novel, it can be argued that their use of my name is “non-rivalrous.” After all, nothing tangible has been taken away from me. It can also be argued that any devaluing of my literary reputation is nothing I have any right to control, since “reputation” is nothing tangible and exists only in the minds of others.It’s only the recognition of property rights being bounded and limited by ownership of identity and products branded with that identity that the survival of property rights into and beyond the Information Age begins to have a defensible foundation.

And you have not even attempted to address my question. So I’ll try it again, in case you overlooked it:

Please explain to me how it is possible to “do it better than anyone else” when anyone and everyone else has the absolute right to take “the expression of your idea” (expression being the operative concept — an issue that seems to elude (or be deliberately ignored by) most everyone here), copy it in every detail, leave your name (or mark) on it, and offer it as a substitute for your own at a lesser price, or for free. How can you “do it better” when you’re competing with yourself? You have created a paradigm here that cannot function and the only rational thing left is to think, do, and say nothing.