Dear Satish,
As CMD of James Martin & Co I may be able to understand your inclination towards the present regime of "intellectual property" and "copyrights". But I cannot believe that you are naive enough not to be able to distinguish between alphabets and property. I try to explain briefly, in case I am wrong.
Alphabets are nobody's property. Nobody needs to be paid royalty to use it. Anybody can learn alphabets if they want to. Anybody can teach alphabets to anybody else, and nobody can question his(her) rights to do so. Can you claim the same about land? Can you claim the same about any copyrighted material or patent (knowledge)?
Regards V. Sasi Kumar
On Tue, 2002-12-17 at 00:21, satish jha wrote:
sunil:
before we learnt to use alphabets, there were no illiterates either. so let us not have alphabest?? ________________________________ satish jha cmd, james martin & co www.jmcin.com president, digital partners india n-103, panchsheel park, new delhi - 110 017 v: 649 9384/5; 649 4384/5 f: 649 4380
----- Original Message ----- From: sunil To: bytesforall_readers@yahoogroups.com Cc: linux-india-general@lists.sourceforge.net ; fsf-friends@gnu.org.in Sent: Monday, December 16, 2002 5:21 PM Subject: Re: [bytesforall_readers] Microsoft to share Windows code withIndia
Dear Satish,
Free Software is not Open Source Software. Access to code is not the main issue. Free License implies Ownership and Control. It is not the recipe of coke but the ownership of coke.
Copyrighting is the root cause of the digital divide... here is an oversimplification so that you can understand..
Before the concept of Private Property: No Economic Divide After the concept of Private Property: Land Owners Landless Economic Divide
Before the concept of Intellectual Property:- No Digital Divide After the concept of Intellectual Property: Those with Knowledge Those without Knowledge Digital Divide
You will notice this trend in all forms of privatization:- water, phrases, gestures, ideas, products etc.
General Public License transfers ownership of digital assets to the poor. To use a Marxist phrase - the means of production in the knowledge economy will be transfered to the poor. This is a 'critical' component of any digital divide intervention.Without this type of systemic intervention all other ICT is merely technology band-aid.
Please see my IIM-B presentation for more details: http://www.mahiti.org/events/Event.2002-12-16.3025/view
Thanks,
Sunil Thanks,
Sunil
===== Sunil Abraham [MAHITI] 314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA Ph/Fax: +91 80 5352003. Pager: 9624 279519 sunil@mahiti.org http://www.mahiti.org
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