Hi all,

I've made a small change in the subject because now we are talking about much more than just Ebay and looking at *Principles*, *values* and a number of other intangibles (yes, Alex including Intellectual Property).

In 1999, David Pogue said:
"Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn't affect people who aren't onlin (and on a tiny minority of the world population is). And if you don't like the Internet's system, you can always flip off the modem.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig - another renown author - challenges this point of view and asserts that today the battles that rage online dearly affect "people who aren't online". He says that there is no swith that will insulate us from the Internet's effect.

He then proceeds to elaborate on what he calls a "Free Culture" and I quote:

...we come from a tradition of 'free culture' .... A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property.it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid...a free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it.

In my view, the incidents and circumstances surrounding the ebay saga are evidence that extremism is beginning to show, and that those who can afford it are manipulating the 'system' to protect themselves and their property regardless of the fact/extent that they are infringing on the rights of the *individual consumer* - who is largely innocent.

Regards,

Brian

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Alex Gakuru <alex.gakuru@yahoo.com> wrote:

--- On Mon, 7/7/08, Brian Munyao Longwe <blongwe@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Brian Munyao Longwe <blongwe@gmail.com>

> So, I still come back to my earlier point. If I want to
> sell my Toyota
> AE-100 - I have a right to 'identify' it using the
> brand (though the
> brand does not in itself belong to me) - but I have a
> 'transient'
> ownership as far as it relates to 'my' toyota.
> People even refer to it
> as Bryo's toyota. Of course once it is sold, it now
> belongs to someone
> else.
>

July 7, 2008. Intellectual Property Regime Stifles Science and Innovation, Nobel Laureates Say

By Dugie Standeford for Intellectual Property Watch MANCHESTER, UK - The basic framework of the intellectual property (IP) regime aims to "close down access to knowledge" rather than allowing its dissemination, Professor Joseph Stiglitz said at a 5 July lecture on "Who Owns Science?" Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, and Professor John Sulston, a 2002 Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine, launched Manchester University's new Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation. Both were highly critical of today's patent system, saying it stifles science and innovation.

Link to the article: <http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1129>






--
Brian Munyao Longwe
e-mail: blongwe@gmail.com
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