http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn1GlPrhAYQ

Who knows how many better or improved ideas would result from collaboration. Collaboration, mind you, that is probably not limited at the moment.

I probably should qualify my arguments. I agreed with your statement with respect to the wisdom neutral field of technology. I limited that statement to some degree because I have on many occasions brushed up against much wiser people in the social sciences and found myself lacking. Maybe there are more brilliant people out there but as for most students – great social ideas result from experience not imagination.

Still if your writing linux code it doesnt matter how old you are.

You ask: “If you bought a Sony AIBO, then why can’t you teach it to dance?; if you paid for a DVD, then why shouldn’t you be able to watch it on your Linux machine?” In general, you are working from someone else’s expressions, from a copy that you bought while agreeing to the restrictions in the first place. If you don’t like the restrictions, don’t buy the copy.

But I think your specific questions hide the ball a bit. If limited to teaching the specific AIBO that you bought to dance, and watching a specific DVD copy that you bought on a Linux machine, both of these uses are benign and uninteresting to the point of irrelevance.

But you know and I know that the obvious larger question is whether (or the extent to which) one ought to have the right to produce (and distribute) derivative works from copies that are obtained with the limitations against so doing in plain view. What is the foundation’s view on this?

My point is that this derivation issue, if fairly posed, would overwhelm what appears to me to be a larger purpose, which is to share one’s work to the extent that others can use it to build an overall better body of work, along the lines of the open source software world. The trouble, and the roadblocks, come in with the short cuts of using works from those who didn’t agree to the sharing in the first place.

But the foundation is not my toy. So it is up to you. But you asked for my input, so here it is.

Thanks for posing the question.

I think the portion of the manifesto you pointed out was referencing the fact that a lot of companies place enormous restrictions on the uses of a product even after you buy it, essentially trouncing upon your fundamental right to tinker. If you bought a Sony AIBO, then why can’t you teach it to dance?; if you paid for a DVD, then why shouldn’t you be able to watch it on your Linux machine?; and so on.

But at universities, the target audience has to be consumers of pop music and other entertainment media. That’s where there are lots of (double scare quotes) “”non-nerds”” who have something at stake in the debate. This is why the uncomfortable political issues about the rights of artists, designers etc. that I discussed in comments on the last post are unavoidable for this movement. People’s having enjoyed free (as in costless) music from Napster seems to inevitably bring up the conflict between artists and record labels over revenue sharing. I suspect that there are similar issues in computer design, though I am totally ignorant in that department.

It’s not that I, myself, would especially like to discuss the issue in terms of “intellectual property rights”. But I do think that could be a convenient idiom for facilitating a discussion between rights-obsessed libertarians and those of us who just want to secure the free and open development of culture.