e-texts revisited

[snarf]

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive
property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an
individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but
the
moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and
the
receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is
that
no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He
who
receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening
mine;
as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That
ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral
and
mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have
been
peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like
fire,
expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and
like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being,
incapable
of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in
nature, be
a subject of property."

- Thomas Jefferson