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Redistribution of Power from Government to Intellectual Property Rights Owners and Organizations Looking After Their Interests: Justifiable from a Liberalist Position? – The Free Software Foundations Position Compared to John Locke's Concept of Distributable Rights

Kai K. Kimppa, Redistribution of Power from Government to Intellectual Property Rights Owners and Organizations Looking After Their Interests: Justifiable from a Liberalist Position? – The Free Software Foundations Position Compared to John Locke's Concept of Distributable Rights. In: Simone Fishcer-Hübner Jan Holvast Albin Zuccato Penny Duquenoy (Ed.), Risks and Challenges of the Network Society, 61-69, Universitetstryckeriet, Karlstad, 2003.

Abstract:

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government and especially The Second Treatise of Government can be seen as the starting point of liberalist thinking in distribution of power and the concept of property, be it material or immaterial. This paper offers a new view on what rights in intellectual property can be redistributed from the people to the government and organizations and from the government to organizations – and especially which cannot if one is consistently liberalist in the Lockean sense. In this paper will be shown how the redistribution of people's rights to the immaterial can not be based on Locke and how that in fact fits with the Free Software Foundations (FSF) view to the immaterial. An alternative will be introduced – an alternative, that closely follows the FSF's position – and how the GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) General Public License and copyleft are the tools to this end.

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BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpKimppa03b,
  title = {Redistribution of Power from Government to Intellectual Property Rights Owners and Organizations Looking After Their Interests: Justifiable from a Liberalist Position? – The Free Software Foundations Position Compared to John Locke's Concept of Distributable Rights},
  booktitle = {Risks and Challenges of the Network Society},
  author = {Kimppa, Kai K.},
  editor = {Penny Duquenoy, Simone Fishcer-Hübner Jan Holvast Albin Zuccato},
  publisher = {Universitetstryckeriet, Karlstad},
  pages = {61-69},
  year = {2003},
  keywords = {intellectual property, IPR, liberalism, free software, Locke, distributable rights},
}

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