Xanthippa's Chamberpot

Copyright.

So many people think that ‘copyright’ and ‘patents’ are necessary to protect artists and scientists and must be rigidly enforced in order to protect creativity.

Except that…

The WAY this is being done is so wrong, it actually HINDERS creativity and research and all that.

Do you know that doctors claim that the number one obstacle in, for example, the research to cure cancer, is patents?

No kidding!

This is because patents and copyrights are not being granted for things people invented, but for naturally occurring things that people happen to describe.

In the case of fight against cancer, the most infamous such patent is for the genetic sequence of breat cancer tissue:  the genetic sequence has been patented and nobody – absolutely nobody – is permitted to do any research on it without paying such ridiculously expensive royalties to the patent holder that it makes the whole process incredibly expensive…meaning most researchers cannot even touch it.  And, even if you had breast cancer and wanted to use your own tissue to do the research on – you would still not be poermitted to.

By the terms of that patent, you are not the master over your own flesh!!!

And, yes – it is, in no uncdrtain terms, the thin wedge of ‘technological slave-mastery’!

But that is a complex issue – which I invite you to due the due dilligence on on your own, because what you find is hard to believe if it comes second hand.

Here, however, is a very simple example of inapropriate copyright grant: pi.

Yes, the constant which is used to ‘calculate circles’!

Some guy had copyrighted the first 32 digits of pi, as set to music.  Not his arrangement (and he certainly was not the first to set pi to music), but ALL the arrangements of seting one of the best known constants in human history to music.

Listen and weep!