[Cdn-DMCA] CATA Alliance - quick notes...

[Kristofer Coward]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 08:29:00AM -0500, Russell McOrmond wrote:
>   My rejection of the notion of "Intellectual Property" in general, and my
> support for business models around software as a service should make my
> disagreement with them on whether software is a product or service fairly
> obvious.

Be careful about rejecting IP in general. In some cases, it is useful -
especially as a countermeasure to potentially innovation-stifling
govenrment policies.  The canonical example is medical technology:
there are innovation-stifling regulations on the depolyment of medical
technology (because keeping people from getting dead or disfigured is
generally more important than the capacity for innovation that's been
traded off.)  In order for a company to market a medical product or
service, they need to spend considerable amount of money on research
and trials to determine the safety and efficacy of their innovation. If
someone else could then start selling it after they'd sunk all that
capital into proving it is sufficiently safe and effective to be
allowed for use, they simply wouldn't conduct the research.

Of course, in the case of software or entertainment, there are no such
death-and-disfigurement considerations to justify the same IP regime
that is used for medicine.

ObDisclosure: I hold stock in a Medical/Biotech startup whose product I
find so wonderful that I can hardly wait for it to get commercialised
(even if it doesn't make me rich :) )

-- 
Kristofer Coward				http://unripe.melon.org/
GPG Fingerprint: 2BF3 957D 310A FEEC 4733  830E 21A4 05C7 1FEB 12B3
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