I’m so proud of the gaming community!  It just goes to show you that video games really don’t corrupt the values of said individuals quite like the anti-electronic game groups would like the wider public to believe.

Ok, i’ve said this in the somewhat distant past here, but i think this is a good opportunity to drive the position further home:  The idea of Intellectual Property should die a quick, ugly death.

I have no problem paying a fee to own a hard-drive or a rocking chair.  These are physical items organised to provide a service.  More importantly, their physical nature makes their ownership (read: use) limited.  Owning a slab of resources that provide a service is completely understandable.

But, software?  Many lines of code organised to provide a service?  These replicated lines should not be owned.  It’s logistically a big, big problem.

It’s such a problem that, as in your article, companies are sometimes spending more money in both infrastructure and humans to protect the idea of its copy being equal to some amount of cash (read: resources).  We’re beyond that phase of property.

The day is soon coming, possibly heralded by some economic collapse/re-organisation, where thought is never, ever anyone’s property.  Limiting the acquisition of other’s thoughts (books, music, art of all media sorts, software, etc) limits our collective development of information into knowledge.

I see an infoworld where services are property, and you pay for information to be massaged, for an ability to do this or that in a medium.  People might argue that this would mean the death of art, of music, of this or that medium.

It would mean the death of art without use or function, and that wouldn’t be bad at all.

.rob adams

Oh well, it really doesn’t matter when Half-Life 2 (or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for that matter) comes out. I won’t be able to afford that kind of CPU-power for at least a year or two more

As to rob adams:

Intellectual property rights will remain a necessity. I’m an author of sorts (meaning like many people I’m hoping to publish a book of mine some day) and I can tell you that I *DO* want money for my work. Writers have to live too.

Information does not ‘want to be free’. Thats nonsense. What the copyright discussion should be about is fair use and modern distribution channels - and NOT about depriving the creators of their revenue.

By the way, info services, what you seem to refer to in the latter part of your post, are NOT really different from books/songs and so on. Its simply data manipulated in a certain way. Books are that too. Music is that too. Someone took words and sounds and put them together in a certain way. He’s entitled to compensation - even if his creation is easily duplicatable.

PS: Les, I still wonder about why no names are visible in the comments header…?

Half-Life 2 will reportedly run on as little as a 700MHz system.

As for names in the comment header, I’m not quite sure what you mean. The name of each poster is right there in front of the date. I see it just fine.