hers, to whom I am grateful. . . . However, I should note in honesty that when Wired sends me a check for having temporarily "fixed" it on their pages, I alone will cash it.There is another interesting angle that comes up when writers write about intellectual property. In certain contractual situations, the author has already legally abandoned the ability to practice what he may be preaching. In early 1999, Stewart Alsop wrote one of the few articles which has both questioned the current intellectual property regime and appeared in the business press--in this case, Fortune. Alsop's article concludes: Doesn't it begin to feel as if we should go back and reexamine our assumptions about whether creative effort should be protected by the government? Of course, as a spur to these discussions, I would love to grant you blanket permission to copy this article freely, but I don't own the copyright. You'll have to ask the permissions manager here at Fortune if you want to make more than one copy.So, we can not escape it. If you talk about intellectual property in public, you have to look at what you yourself are doing, and the context in which you are doing it. All three of these articles that I've quoted from were copyrighted. All three of the authors received money, under the traditional rules of intellectual property, for articles in which they critically questioned those very rules. Are there ethical problems here? Are they facing a conflict of interest? Do we even have a good way of phrasing these questions, let alone answering them? I don't know, and I can't preach to anyone else about how they should approach these issues. But I definitely feel that the only way I can maintain some sort of objectivity is if I personally do not have money riding on the very subject that I'm trying to examine. So there it is. I don't own this essay, and neither does anyone else. Do with these words what you will. Run this essay through a photocopier, put th...
