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To: unlearner
The intent to protect intellectual property rights came from the founders.

No. The notion that copyright and patents constituted "property" was unknown to the Founders. You are reading a late 19th century idea about their nature back to the American Founding.

The Founders plainly did not understand them to be property, since a short term followed by passage into the public domain (something that doesn't happen with property -- houses, furniture, paintings, coins,... don't pass to the public or revert to common in the Lockean sense simply by the passage of time) is what they put into law in the First Congress: for copyrights the same terms as the Law of Queen Anne, 14 years, renewable for another 14 at the request of the author, not the "rightsholder", not the author's estate, the author, period.

54 posted on 02/13/2015 8:15:19 PM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know...)
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To: The_Reader_David

“The notion that copyright and patents constituted ‘property’ was unknown to the Founders.”

I was not talking about nomenclature. You can say the constitutional “exclusive right” to inventions is not property, but in modern terminology, ownership is implied.

IP is not a direct extension of natural law in the way real property ownership is. It is somewhat of a social contract whereby we elect representatives who establish the applicable IP law and make treaties whereby inventions can be exploited in other nations as well.


57 posted on 02/13/2015 10:30:39 PM PST by unlearner (You will never come to know that which you do not know until you first know that you do not know it.)
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