To Richard Stallman, that is. I was reading what occasionally passes
for news while eating chicken curry for lunch when I ran across a
column Stallman wrote for CNET news.com. In it Stallman wrote:
"When someone uses the term 'intellectual property,' typically he's
either confused himself, or trying to confuse you. The term is used to
lump together copyright law, patent law and various other laws, whose
requirements and effects are entirely different. Why is Mr. Gates
lumping these issues together? Let's study the differences he has
chosen to obscure."
Now, the statement "When someone uses the term 'intellectual
property,'typically he's either confused himself, or trying to confuse
you" is easily over the top enough to roll my eyes back into my head.
But it starts out worse; Stallman opens the article with this:
"When CNET News.com asked Bill Gates
about software patents, he shifted the subject to 'intellectual
property,' blurring the issue with various other laws."
Yet when I read that same
interview
to which Stallman refers to in his article I found that Gates didn't
introduce this term--it was introduced by the interviewer asking about
"intellectual-property rights." In fact, here's the question:
"In recent years, there's been a lot
of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property
rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a
bunch of advocates saying, "We've got to look at patents, we've got to
look at copyrights." What's driving this, and do you think
intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?"
No need to shift the subject to "intellectual property," is there? It already
is the subject of the question. This
disconnect between Stallman's analysis and the text of the Gates
interview, of course, sets up a major cognitive dissonance, causing
questions to careen madly through my mind:
- Did Stallman link to the wrong interview? Surely not, the text of
the interview does refer to communists in the context of intellectual
property rights..
- Is Stallman himself shifting the subject and obscuring the issue?
- Does Stallman get paid for writing columns like this?
- Can I get paid to poop out columns like that? Do I need anything more than to be opinionated and outspoken?
- Can I ever possible recover the time I spent reading Stallman's column?
Of course I jest. But not entirely.
Channel 10: Black Friday Deals on Windows 7 Machines
ASP.NET: Presenting in Europe Next Week
WindowsClient: You know your post rate has gone down...
Silverlight: Geek Profiles – Scott Guthrie
