Intellectual Property? was Bill Gates

Steve Witham (sw@tiac.net)
Sun, 5 Oct 1997 11:29:12 -0400


"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes

>To some extent, Microsoft's dominance derives from their illegal and unlawful
>theft of intellectual property. Even if intellectual property should be
>abolished, as Lee advocates, Microsoft's competitors couldn't use Microsoft's
>intellectual property,

Huh? Can you explain this last part? If Int.Prop. was abolished, what
would MS's Int.Prop. *be*, and why couldn't someone else use it??

>and Microsoft was either stealing or using coercion so

What is "stealing," if there is no property involved?

>that only it had free access to intellectual property

What would it mean to have free access to something that was abolished?

>. Unlawful, any way you
>look at it.

Um, what laws are you assuming I'm looking at it through?

--Steve

--
sw@tiac.net    Steve Witham    www.tiac.net/users/sw under deconstruction
"...when activated, it pops a message off the bag
    and recurs with the tail of the bag."
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