"I believe that all knowledge comes from previously discovered knowledge, unless it is revealed truth then it comes from God when and how He sees fit in His loving kindness to us. I could see many good uses of such a program. Give an idea and let others advance it, then you can see what they did and improve it more yourself."As I understand it, that's really one of the key reasons for the flexible copyright push--the idea that for society to progress in knowledge we need to share what we already know so we can learn more ... together. I make something, you make it better, and we all benefit. It's really a cool, unselfish and humble way of looking at things. As Sheldon says, nobody really creates new knowledge anyway -- it always comes from bits and pieces of pre-existing knowledge. Interesting that the hebrew word for "creation" really means something more along the lines of "organize." That's really what creation is -- reorganizing old stuff to make something new.
I'll finish my post with another cool quote from Sheldon about what all of this ethics talk is about anyway:
"I think that all these things mainly comes down to protection of rights. Someone who has an idea should receive credit for it (for instance my great grandfather actually developed the geiger counter but then Geiger stole it and patented it), you should be able to share your ideas, you have the right to access public information, and it is a right to be protected from unwanted material, viruses scam artists and such. I think the most useful thing to me was just to make me aware of all of these different issues. I had never really thought of exactly what copyright is or what I can legally use etc."
