>I note that your contempt for intellectual property law stems from the
>social position o someone whose income does not depend on protection of the
>specific symbolic representations that you produce. You get your salary
even
>if (like most professors) you are not paid any money for the stuff you
>write. Professionl writers feel differently. That's why Courtney Love has
>fits about Napster.
Professional writers don't care about copyright per se-- since most of them don't really control them- but they care about being paid for their work. Those are two different things that only our social arrangements force together.
As you note, many scientists and research professionals don't depend on intellectual property, since they are paid to produce regardless. In fact, the increasing penetration of IP into academic science is completely perverting scholarship in the biomedical field. My next Populist column is likely to be on this subject. The world would be far better off if writers and artists got paid for their labor without then turning it into a market commodity.
How to do that is an issue-- one is the obvious of just putting them on payroll, as with academics, but there are also more incentive based systems, such as peer-reviewed prizes, essentially a far expanded system of Pulitzer-style awards going to a far larger number of artists. Or a more consumer-driven system of measuring the popularity of works and giving monetary awards in proportion- as happens with the British library system in payments to authors based on the number of times a book is borrowed from a library.
Now, plagiarism is an important issue in that case, since recognition also means payment, but I think they are quite divisible from the IP issues. As has been noted, academics hate plagiarism as much as Cortney Love, so I don't see a strong link
-- Nathan Newman