[Buddha-l] Re: yoga (TM)

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sun, 2005-10-16 at 14:15 -0400, Peter D. Junger wrote:

> The term "intellectual property" is a recent invention and hardly
> existed---if it did exist at all---in the mid-fifties of the last
> century when I went to law school.  It is a rhetorical device to
> lump together various legal tools that allow one person to control
> what others may think or may do with their thoughts and then to
> say that if someone avoids those controls he is a thief stealing
> the "property" of the person who claims the legal right to control
> the "thief's" thoughts.

Thanks for the summary, Peter. It is good to hear about this from an
expert in law. My own experience with the concept of "intellectual
property" comes from sitting on the university senate computer policy
committee (a hell realm for some undisclosed sin I must have committed
in a past life). We spent a great deal of time listening to the
university's lawyers explaining why any potentially lucrative work
professors did while being paid by the university was owned by the
university, while any crime committed while doing lucrative work was the
professor's responsibility. The message, in short, was: The Company Wins
Every Time.

> The oldest and, even today, often the most effective way of protecting 
> ideas from others is to keep them secret.

It is not at all clear whether the prevailing ethos of the modern
academy is "Publish or perish" or "Be secretive or be screwed."

Speaking of all this stuff, some years ago I heard a rumor that Goenka
Inc were trying to get a trademark for the term Vipassana. I hope that
rumor was false, since trying to own any aspect of the path of
renunciation would surely result in at least a billion aeons in a hell
in which the only software was open source.

-- 
Richard Hayes