The "intellectual property" misnomer

[David McNab]

On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 08:10:48 +0950, Ben Finney paused, took a deep breath,
then came out with:

> But please *don't* muddy the water by saying the PSF holds "the
> intellectual property rights" for Python.  That says nothing useful
<snip>

Too right.

Copyrights create a level of 'ownership' of verbatim code. Good.

Patents, as they're administered today, create a level of 'ownership' of
even the most simple concepts (the kind of thing anyone could think of),
whereby it's almost impossible these days to write more than a few dozen
lines of code without infringing n patents. Very bad.

The lumping together of these two very different legal categories is an
insidious lie that runs totally counter to the spirit of freedom which
Python represents, and threatens to turn software development into a
closed shop for only the largest corporations (which it was in the
earliest days, when only the largest organisations and companies could
afford a computer).

EB