| | (Steve, I am writing on my Mac; and RoR is standardized on Microsoft, so this will be plain, without quotations and other fancy stuff. I can do it, but I have to embed the codes by hand, a bit of a hassle.)
Pirates of Silicon Valley is a story, supposedly history. It portrays events that are not well documented. However, it is ironic that Steve Jobs accused Bill Gates of stealing the Apple Macintosh GUI, when Apple took the idea from Xerox after visiting PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center). This is story is well known. I trust that you know it, also.
You must also know that in the 90s, software companies attempted to sue each other over "look and feel." This is nothing new. In the early days of automobiles, makers tried to patent the steering wheel and other innovations. The Wright Brothers delayed publicity on their airplane waiting for patents and then they sued Glenn Curtiss over "wing warping." (Curtiss invented the wing flap, something very different from bending the wing.) These examples and many others show the harm in how we think about "intellectual property rights."
I put that in quotes because, like "God," many different people claim many different things by the word. Until someone posits a claim, arguing against the idea is just constructing strawmen. Even if you quote this or that person or people, you only argue against them, not all advocates of the same or similar claims.
We here would all agree that if I buy two copies of Othello, tear them into sheets, replace "William Shakespeare" with "Michael Marotta," print them into books of my own and sell them, that would be theft. (Shakespeare being dead is one complication. His identity being questionable is another. I hope that we can agree on the essence of the problem: I cannot put my name on someone else's work.) That said, if you saw Henry Ford puttering about in an early machine, and said, "I can build one of those" would you be stealing his work?
I trust that you will agree with me that there is no moral-practical dichotomy. You seem to insist that as morality is the foundation for action that an action which is practical must not be allowed until its moral basis is proved. I suggest that an action which is practical indicates its moral premises. (I also understand Ayn Rand's quip that the definition of practical depends on what it is you intend to practice.) I have referred to Johanna Blakley's TED Lecture on the lack of intellectual property in fashions. Fashions are three orders of magnitude (trillions of dollars versus billions) larger than the markets with strong intellectual property laws. As this seems to work quite well for all, it must be moral, even if we Objectivists have not provided the world with a consistent theory to explain the practice.
As a writer, I have been ripped off. Once was by Defense Computing magazine; and we worked that out: they paid me. Once was by Vassar University; they took down the webpage, even though I offered them new, original content; they did not even ask the price. There are other examples out there on the WWW, especially in the numismatic community. I don't think much of it one way or another. I never decline a request to reproduce an extant work. I often create new work for any hobbyist who asks. (Like the Open Source hackers, much of it I do for free.) Even as, at the same time, I propose work for pay to those who can afford my rates. The choice is mine. I recognize my own intellectual property rights. But I have no consistent theory to explain them. It's complicated. I have not thought it through.
And so, with the pirates of Silicon Valley, did we see intense young people stealing new ideas from each other and selling them to us. Would you refuse to buy Windows because it was stolen from Apple, or to a buy a Mac because the GUI was stolen from Xerox PARC? You would refuse to buy a stolen car. I grant that easily. You are honest and honorable. I have no doubt about that. But I am not sure that you always would know a stolen idea if you saw one, or what to do about it.
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