[rllin]

this is in a class of problems i've been thinking about recently

- usury

- patents

- copyrights

- land

- software as a service

the first 3 all have some slowly changing socially acceptable period of profit. and they are all enshrined in law. but this means there are also frameworks in place for adjusting this period of profit (lobbying, etc.)

the 4th is only capped by property taxes and sometimes with unintended consequences (cf. prop 13)

the 5th is unregulated and seems socially acceptable to have no definite end date due to a combination of (sometimes artificial) technical difficulty (need for support, e.g. RedHat, any other company based on FOSS) and slow addition of pithy features.

i'm not sure i have any conclusions, but I think this framework is useful because it allows us to examine it with an older moral framework rather than a more (post) modern marxist.