Free Software Magazine - Free software liberates Venezuela

Free Software Magazine - Free software liberates Venezuela:

"The term intellectual property itself is of course a new-speak propaganda word that didn’t even exist 20 years ago. First, the topic it covers varies from Copyrights, Patents, Trade Secrets and Trademarks, to a variety of other things, all of which are in reality all very different and unrelated. Second, it’s based on the premise that you can give something intangible to someone else, and yet control it and decide what other people do with it, as if it or they (and even the ideas they may have about it) were your physical property. Intellectual property amounts in part to thought control through legal fiction. Some even say it amounts to Intellectual Slavery.
The consequence of treating ideas and thoughts as if they are tangible property is the very destruction of science and education and the elimination of individual rights and freedoms. Science is in part built upon the idea that new knowledge is created by incrementally improving ideas. Education is based on the idea that one can learn from existing things and then use that knowledge to create new works. The idea behind “Intellectual Property” interferes with both. It is barbarism, and could well lead to a new “dark ages”, where only a privileged few are allowed to learn, under the exclusive control of greedy intellectual monopolies.
Since “Intellectual Property” involves exclusive licensing, when public universities do this and then let others license their discoveries, the public is made to fund research that only benefits a small number of people. Even worse, those companies which receive such funding can then use this exclusive grant to sell back to society the fruits of what society already paid for. This can be thought of as paying for something twice. This could also be thought of as public welfare for private corporations, or more simply: exploitation."