[_0uto]

Imagine if all improvements over the course of history would be kept in secret for gains of owners of capital. Who own rights to the invention of an axe? Probably the first one who put a stone on a piece of wood. Should he has all rights for it forever? I couldn't really agree.

[ianai]

Which is why such property rights are supposed to fade with time. Corporate interests have just pushed that time frame to eternity in recent laws.

[sokoloff]

There’s a difference between having the right to the concept of an axe and having the right to my specific axe. I think GP was speaking more towards the latter.

[sneak]

It seems, sadly, that in software we have conflated the two. My specific iPhone is a brick without a government-recognized license for a copy of Apple’s sequence of numbers that instruct it.

[sokoloff]

You also didn’t make the phone. Apple did and sold it to you under certain arms-length terms, presumably terms that both sides were willing to accept.

That’s quite a bit more acceptable to me than someone deciding that Apple’s phones should be theirs because reasons.