The story the “Right to Read” by Richard Stallman is a fictional short story describing the ethical dilemma that is faced by a young student Dan when his peer asks to borrow his laptop to write a midterm. The dilemma comes because in this fictional world there are organizations that enforce heavily the licensing on books. The software protection authority in this story is an agency that has strong authority in finding and apprehending people who read books without the proper license.
I think that patenting and licensing are becoming restrictive to creativity and freedom of information. There are a couple of reasons that I could see patenting and licensing becoming increasingly restrictive in the future. If I randomly generate 1’s and 0’s for an infinite amount of time and put the string I get in a book this book contains all information that will ever exist, every book that has ever been created and every book that ever will be created. What if I decide to copyright this book? do I now have ownership of all knowledge that has ever existed? Inherently there must be a balance in patenting and licensing between what has been invented and what we know exists already. On the another note if I invent a new word that revolutionized English could I say that as the inventor I retain the right to solely use this word if this was the case with a word like “the” then there would be major issues as it would make of the English language basically a tax.
A main argument for the increased use of licensing and patenting is that this is one of few ways to protect your intellectual asset. As an inventor the main asset that you gain from research and development (which can often be very expensive) is this intellectual asset; without a way to protect this asset people would not be inclined to risk the cost of research and development. Another reason for the increased use of licensing and patenting is that these licenses and patents can be used to benefit your resume as an individual if you have a portfolio of patents and licenses in a particular field of science then this may look good to someone hiring. If these inventions are not credited to your name, then there would be no way to provide you with personal benefit of being the inventor.
I do support the current legal system of licensing and patenting. Some measures that I would use to prevent the fictional destiny depicted in the story would be the shortening of the time that it takes for a work to become public information. I think that this would have the benefit of allowing more information to be distributed freely while also giving the opportunity to still make money and protect your asset. All in all, I have not had enough experience with these systems to comment on how I would change them but I am sure that eventually this will be something that I have to deal with frequently in my life I hope that going forward changes are made to protect freedom of information for the individual rather than always benefiting the corporations.
James Sommerville CP373 Blog 