Zac_Dai said:
This is why I feel the whole concept of intellectual property rights needs to be overhauled.
Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright laws have been flawed for decades now (I can't speak further because I haven't been alive much further than that).
We are dealing with infinitely replicable resources and treating them as rarer than finitely replicable resources. The punishments are far harsher almost always.
Plus you have to deal with the problem of assuming that it is impossible for a second person to invent something after the first person did. If it is truly impossible then how did the first person come to the conclusion?
I mean sure, if two people had the Mona Lisa, you could argue that it is unlikely that both of them painted the exact same thing and that one is copying. But that is rarely the kind of extreme situation we are dealing with.
"Virtual Open Words?" "Remote Controls" These things are vague and, like the telescope, end up popping up in multiple places around the same time.
Why?
Because we all have the same damn biology and world to live on. Sure there are biomes differences that result in us crafting different tools for the same basic desired end (IE eating) but the overall path is the same.
Human history doesn't repeat itself because we are stubborn, it repeats itself because evolution and the environment don't change nearly fast enough or dramatic enough to warrant changes in our actions or thoughts.
This isn't a blanket truth, various things have evolved on the intellectual level because of advances in technology (and thus psuedo changes in the size of the Earth via aircrafts and automobiles), but our individual inventions are very likely to not be utterly unique on the planet.
I'm sure for every guy who discovered electricity there was another guy who discovered electricity (oh right there was), for every guy who discovers the telescope, the television, likely thousands of food dishes, and probably just about everything else.
This company acting like it "breathed into life an idea that never before lived." is, for a lack of a better word at the moment, retarded.
If you can think it up, somebody else probably already has, whether or not they put that knowledge into action doesn't matter since the argument isn't that "We are protecting the rights of folks to keep making shit cause they started making it first." The argument is "I thought this up, you stole my idea, period."
