[Pierre-Marie Baty]

I believe the idea behind all patents and copyrights, and behind all things patentable and copyrightable, is an acknowledgment of the work the author has put into it. What makes the worth of just about anything, is the amount of work it represents, i.e. how hard and how long one has employed oneself to create it out of nothing, which is not the same thing as how hard and how long one has to employ oneself to copy it. In this sense, software is copyrightable, books are too, and ideas as well.

DNA patents, on the other hand, are utter ineptia.

That said, I am not advocacing copyrights and patents, I just say that I understand them. Ideally, if every person on earth was generous enough to share everyone's knowledge and actually work for the common good instead of just for oneself, knowledge and ideas would spread much better and much more naturally, and our mankind would certainly be MUCH more advanced than it is now. This implies working for free. The pending is getting a living for free, too. Both work altogether. But I'm an idealist. I know.