demonstrating how near-to the reptile brain is lodged the mercantile sub-brain. Oil cartels? Hell, let's make everybody pay to find out the At. Wt. of Element 118, recently said to have been created for a few pSec. at LBL..

And this all has occurred quite before the similar mindset spawned the DMCA and other modern bizness wet dreams. (I read rather rapidly and have to go back for more of the delicious prose.)

This also fits another piece into the puzzle wherein, my 'multi-lingual scholar' friend spent a year in Moscow, working for Maik-NAUKA, the Russian ~ of the Academy of Sciences. While editing, translating for them, she also discovered a certain amount of the sleaze factor implicit in this article. I merely presumed that such an attitude was an artifact of the nascent Russian chaos (this was back in '92 or so). Hah! - latecomers.

Thanks for some more good writing. Fascinating discussion of the elements of 'intellectual property' / what the first printers hoped that might mean, etc. Hackneyed or no, it does seem that we are seeing such a paradigm shift - fortunately, after having had that defined for us. Just as clearly - the fate of any idea of an intellectual commons will depend upon how much attention is kept upon the Machiavellian manipulators, cut from the same slime-cloth as our local Beastworks. How to keep that spotlight periodically turned on, in an era of reduced attention-span (?)

{sheesh}. Can homo-sap ever break the terminal-greed habit?
(rhetorical question)


Ashton
Now if I could extract an Oxygen Tax \ufffd of merely a few micro-Euros/liter - by patenting the 2-s 2-p electron motions (reverse engineering becoming a Capital offense) ...