From: Glenn Bradford (gmbradford19@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Aug 21 2004 - 15:10:30 BST
Hi Rick,
> R
> ...if the scheme of IP rights inspires someone to
> create a new or better idea, that they would not
> have otherwise created if
> they didn't think they could profit off of it, is
> that really "prostitution"?
Prostitution does sound like a strong charge, but if a
person exchanges values across levels, such as
exchanging sex (biological) for money (social), the
MOQ would say that a prostitution, or immoral
exchange, of value has taken place. To be consistent,
the MOQ would also have to say that the same kind of
thing is happening when intellectual patterns are
sold. In the first case the money is tainted by the
sex, and in the second the ideas are tainted by the
money. I admit that Pirsig does not explicitly discuss
the morality of trading value between levels, but the
conclusion I draw above seems to me to be a natural
consequence of his moral taxonomy.
IP law's promise of a nice reward might motivate
people to carry through with their ideas, and that is
indeed an important element, but I don't think this
promise inspires the ideas themselves. I tend to think
that an intellectual pursuit has to be its own reward,
a personal one.
> R
> What if the license holder is
> collecting fees to recoup
> his investment rather than to profit, would that be
> different? I would be
> very interested to hear your thoughts on that
> question.
Yes, I think that would be different. You could argue
that there are a lot of social costs and costs in
materials that get included in intellectual
investments. It is moral to recoup those.
> R
> And yet, Pirsig doesn't give LILA away for free (in
> fact, I surmise that he
> has become quite wealthy repeatedly selling the
> movie rights to ZMM and then
> letting them revert to himself). Of course, that
> doesn't mean you're not
> right about what the MoQ would conclude (Phaedrus's
> conclusion that it's
> immoral to eat meat when other foods are available
> doesn't stop him from
> chowing down on a juicy steak just one chapter
> later).
Pirsig once gently explained how all the seeming moral
hypocracies in Lila could be sidestepped. You see it
was Pirsig who stated that it's immoral to eat meat
but it was Phaedrus who actually did the eating. You
don't think a fictional character has to agree with
everything the author believes, do you? Ha ha ha.
As to McWatt's and Glover's efforts to profit off of
Pirsig's ideas - my topic question asked more
generally about the morality of selling intellectual
ideas, but no matter; whether these ideas are your own
or someone else's, the same reasoning applies and the
same conclusions are drawn: intellectual ideas should
not be prostituted for social gain. A friend of mine
pointed out the moral precedence of intellectual ideas
in these two cases quite simply by stating, "If this
is such an important breakthrough in philosophical
thought, I would want everybody to know for nothing".
If you sell a book that contains intellectual ideas,
the MOQ implies that the moral course is to charge the
customer based on the costs of printing, binding, and
shipping the book, along with other social costs, but
not the ideas therein. It follows that if you were to
borrow such a book it shouldn't cost you anything, and
this is the thinking behind Ben Franklin's free public
library system. There is a certain irony in Ant's and
Glove's enterprising efforts to make money off the MOQ
and McWatt, who is charging $30 for a mere PDF file,
is the more morally dubious.
On the other hand, we might take a different tack and
revisit the agreement from a few months ago that money
is a social pattern. If money is seen instead as more
of a purified form of static value potential that is
exchangable with value at any level, then we might be
less psychologically burdened by the immorality of
inter-level exchanges.
Glenn
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