From: J. Andrew Rogers (andrew@ceruleansystems.com)
Date: Sun Mar 23 2008 - 22:06:24 MDT
On Mar 23, 2008, at 4:26 PM, William Pearson wrote:
> Sorry to put a downer on this idea, but it smacks of naivety somewhat.
> The military of any country (and DARPA is not the only one that you
> might be worried about) are not going to respect copyright if it harms
> their perceived defensive capability. These are the people that have
> secrets upon secrets. They will just use your code, secretly.
Why would they do it secretly? At least in the US, the Department of
Defense can walk off with intellectual property like this *legally*,
which has always been the case as far as I know. I am pretty sure
that is true in most other countries as well. And they might even pay
another defense contractor to turn it into a usable implementation.
Usually they play nice and ask for permission, possibly with
compensation, as a matter of form -- they might even pay you to turn
it into what they want -- but you have no recourse if you say no and
they take your technology anyway.
As such things go, DARPA is essentially benign.
> Far and fast is my argument so that any one persons mistake is
> unlikely to stomp on the rest of the people. Democracy and the markets
> seem to be the least bad types of power structures we have made.
Do you understand the failure modes, as it would appear from your
perspective, of democracy and markets when you inject gross
disparities of intelligence?
> So I'd argue for less time spent philosophizing about the license,
> more time spent actually making the damn thing work...
Yes, this is like arguing over how you are going to spend the money if
you win the lottery.
J. Andrew Rogers
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