Don’t mind me saying so, but I would make one incredibly bad lawyer.
When I argue my cases, I can’t stay on track, I digress into oblivion, and whenever possible, jump on the most hyperbolic formulations, usually for my sole petty amusement, at great cost to the convincing potential of my arguments. Also, while I certainly love spending hours dissecting the law, I tend to focus on its spirit, and shun its letter altogether; a luxury I understand no sane lawyer could ever afford.
Yet, I have opinions (bet you hadn’t noticed), and I sometimes discuss them. I sometimes even discuss them with actual lawyers, pretty eloquent [French] bloggers at that. A while back the conversation wandered over to the topic of intellectual property. At the time, I did a pathetic job of exposing my somewhat moderate, if slightly provocatively formulated, views on the matter…
Then recently, while reading up on entirely unrelated matters, I stumbled upon a small text by Mr. Jefferson that happened to sum up most perfectly the essence of my thought on this.
The most basic courtesy would call for me to write this post in French, as I am after all reporting and threading on a discussion I had in French, but the quoted material is in English and there’s been a real dearth of pompous highbrow rants on this blog, so I hope my original debater will overlook this unforgivable faux-pas and not hesitate to respond in whichever language he may prefer… Anyway, here is what this famous American communist close to my heart, had to say on the topic of intellectual property:
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 every one, 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 in 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. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.
“The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”. Edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 1905
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