Far be it from me to defend Microsoft. I use their products as little as I can manage to. But suing the Redmond behemoth over tabbed browsing? The property rights of software development, especially one application that is so fookin' obvious, seems retarded to me. Inventors should benefit from developing new inventions or creative work, but in the end how can you really "own" an idea? Even if you thought of it first and then wrote code to make it work.
This whole business of "property rights" for code, DRM, copyrighting and patents is just absurd. For once you accept the idea that this is all property that you own, what then becomes the mechanism for the "owners" to protect it? Private legal eagle thugs like the RIAA or feds are equally oppressive. I have gotten into this issue before with someone who writes code for a living, and while this guy claims he's a libertarian and desires very limited government, the fly in his ointment is his hypocritical and contradictory notion that a state must exist to protect his work, but it's free markets and sink-or-swim for everyone else.
And which amounts to rent seeking on his part, and which boiled down to its essence, means he's willing to steal money from myself and others to establish a state entity that employs armed police, prosecutors and establishes and maintains prisons, all to protect his precious code. Phooey on that. That idea is nothing more than a state sanctioned market privilege, and no amount of rhetorical sophistry or spin-doctoring will make this vulgar libertarian notion seem rational. None that I've read so far, anyway. But they just keep on trying though. Go figure?
2 comments:
no doubt! as far as libertarianism is concerned, it comes down to this: do you believe that theft, subjugation and murder are right and good or not? do you believe that these civilization destroying behaviors are necessary for the promotion of civilization? is it a good idea that they be wielded by an unaccountable entity of virtually limitless power? if your answer is "no" then you are right to claim the libertarian label. if your answer is "yes", you are not.
so simple...
And yet so hard to grasp.
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