One of the aspects about the current intellectual property/copyright issue is that the main losers are millions of poor people, often living in developing countries. And the winners trying to protect their copyrights are a few rich people trying to make more money. 
So James Surowiecki writes an interesting column on IP in The New Yorker May 14, 2007. He says that when the U.S. was poor, and England was rich, that Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, one of our founding fathers and a great patriot, "advocated the theft of technology." "Among the beneficiaries of this was the American textile industry, which flourished thanks to pirated technology."
Painting of Hamilton by John Trumbull, 1792. Used here without permission!
Surowiecki concludes that IP laws and protection "may make the world safe for Pfizer, Microsoft, and Disney," but they don't benefit the rest of us, either here or abroad.
One of my biggest frustrations with copyright law is the complexity of it. Clearly, it is construed so that the average person can not understand it. That being said I do have my own copyright on file with the US Library of Congress. As of yet I have not even been able to get a real job much less make any money from it. Maybe I should hire an attorney, nah... ;)
Posted by: Maureen Doak | June 15, 2007 at 02:40 PM