I didn't want to sidetrack
this thread, which has its main discussion in full-swing, but I felt the need to respond to something said in
this post:
I believe that using other's ideas without permission is wrong....
This was said in the context of using someone's DROD solution to get a high score, so that was the specific application of this idea. But I think that in general people are too accepting and defensive of the concept that an idea or thought can belong to one person. I know this isn't strictly an American forum, but the founding fathers were very leery of granting control over ideas to one person or entity, and so am I. The rationale given in the Constitution for patents and copyrights is to promote the progress of the arts and sciences. In otherwords, according to the founding fathers, restraint of idea use for a purpose other than promoting new creation is unconstitutional.
The rationale for putting restrictions on ideas to increase the production of ideas is to balance the restraining effect of the restrictions against the creation likely to be fostered by the incentives given to the creators. This balance is supposed to be set so as to maximize the overall utility given to the public. However, the rationalization that reserving rights to creators fosters creation has been repeated over and over to justify continually expanding such creators' rights and restrictions on the public. The idea of balance has been slowly twisted from balancing one good to the public (free use of ideas) against another (availability of new ideas), into balancing the good of the public against the good of the creators. This was not the intention. As far as the founding fathers were concerned, artists could flip burgers or shoe horses for their whole life if that would promote the creation of new ideas. Of course, that is not what would happen, which is why copyrights and patents exist, but they are not justified by the "
moral rights of the creator,"
but rather by the effect they have on the public's availability of ideas.
By and large, copyrights and patents are good policy in that regard, encouraging creation while providing for the ideas so created to eventually become public domain (although the good policy of 120 years of copyright protection or of whether patents on software are even needed to encourage innovation is still being debated), but it should be remembered that these are in fact decisions of
policy, not of moral right.
How does this apply to high scores? No comment. The mixture of functional and creative aspects to scoring, the already existing incentive to compete, and the inability to give attribution make high scoring a very unusual animal. But I wanted to respond to the blanket idea of using "
other people's ideas"
in general.
____________________________
I was charged with conspiracy to commit jay-walking, and accessory to changing lanes without signaling after the fact
.
++Adam H. Peterson
[Last edited by AlefBet at 02-28-2007 11:40 PM]
