Lineland/Intellectual Property

[Joe Varo]

I dunno, foax, but I'm getting a bit confused by all this talk about
intellectual property in relationship to stuff which you freely
disseminate for hundreds, thousands, perhaps (potentially) even millions
of other people to read.

It doesn't sound like Seigel is plagiarizing anybody, just quoting some of
us without explicit permission.  He should have done so, but he didn't.
Some of us seem to be pretty miffed by that; I'm not and the only thing I
fear from this is that it might affect the openess of future p-list
discussions...people may begin to go overboard in self-censorship.

If you go on the radio or tv and say something, either brilliant or
stupid, can you not be quoted?  Isn't the internet just another sort of
broadcast medium?

If you were at a party and said something witty, astoundingly
intelligent, idiotic...whatever...and later on someone quoted you as
having said that, what could you do?  Not much, I think. 

Is it the fact that all of this is written as opposed to oral which
confers it with this special notion of "intellectual property"?

What if the P-list were a usenet newsgroup?  Would the claims of
intellectual property still apply?  In a newsgroup you're essentially just
getting up on a soap box, with a megaphone, blasting out your words for
anyone and everyone to read.

A mailing list just ain't, qualitatively speaking, all that different;
it's just has a smaller readership.

No one is going to post to a newsgroup any groundbreaking info they've
discovered and are planning on using in their phd dissertation.  That
would be stupid...you keep it to yourself and *very* trusted colleagues
until you're officially published and copyrighted.

No one is going to post their discovery of the secret of cold fusion to a
newsgroup or mailing list...other, that is, than a crank.

And if all the squawking about intellectual property is some kind of
attempt to cover up something which you said and may now be ashamed of,
well, maybe you should have thunk twice before posting it.

Maybe my notion if "intellectual property" is just too narrow, but in my
opinion, if you don't completely trust the people with whom you're
speaking, then you'd better watch your tongue.  

Brings to mind a line from James McMurtry...one of his albums...

"Whiskey don't make liars
 it just makes fools.
 I didn't mean to say it,
 but I meant what I said."

Perhaps for some of us, the internet is the whiskey?

Joe