gwax's rumblings

I just read two fan­tas­tic pieces from the Free Software Foundation. The first, a guest post on TorrentFreak, addresses the ques­tion of Why the FSF cares about RIAA law­suits and is a very insight­ful view into the dan­gers involved in the direc­tion that copy­right, patent and trade­mark laws seem to be headed. The sec­ond arti­cle, which was linked from the first, is an arti­cle by Richard M. Stallman on the term “intel­lec­tual prop­erty”, and the dan­gers of con­flat­ing copy­rights, patents, trade­marks and phys­i­cal prop­erty. I find the arti­cle to be both inter­est­ing and insight­ful to a suf­fi­cient extent that I have decided to strike the term “intel­lec­tual prop­erty” from my lex­i­con. Henceforth, I will dis­cuss such mat­ters in the frame of what they are, not the frame that major rights hold­ing orga­ni­za­tions would like to phrase them in.

I feel that these arti­cles are both extremely well writ­ten and make strong points on the nature of copyrights/patents/trademarks. I also feel that these arti­cles give me a bet­ter van­tage point from which to dis­cuss the jux­ta­po­si­tion of copy­rights and phys­i­cal prop­erty rights. There are cer­tainly some sharp peo­ple, doing some very impor­tant things at the FSF.