IDM Mailing Archive

quoted 12 lines Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 10:57:41 -0700

>Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 10:57:41 -0700 >From: "Gause, Brian" <bgause@SECTORBASE.COM> >Subject: warning: peripheral IDM content > >... >course...far be it for me to steal another man's livelihood. But do we >really want to copyright INFORMATION? This is where it leads, right? Can you >imagine that world? We'll be paying pennies each time we use someone's >copywritten metaphor...we'll pay each time we sign our name because our DNA >strands have all been copywritten and suddenly our signature is a product of >those copyrights. The more we soak ourselves in money culture, the further >and further we move away from real freedom.

celera, deCODE, and others are not going to start charging royalties if you want to have kids. they do want to charge pharmaceutical companies and private researchers for access to the genomic data they are collecting. most private sequencing efforts do recognize the need to offer data for free or at low-cost to non-profit, educational research institutions. even so, there is pressure from NCBI and other government projects -- as well as policy by Clinton -- to keep genomics a mostly non-commercial entity. invoking some straw man in the name of defending napster is little better than RIAAs corporate thuggery. let's not get distracted from the reality that mp3 sharing affects real musicians, while recognizing at the same time that RIAA represents *labels* and not musicians, by and large. information does *not* want to be free. the sooner we accept this, the sooner we can move on to ways to make sharing information easier for everyone. -a. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org