It's now illegal to turn on your computer

[Joshua Zeidner]

On 12/30/07, Kevin Brown <kevin_brown at qwest.net> wrote:
> >>> cannot ignore the need for some level of province.  Without fences,
> >>> there are no crops.
> >> Really? Most of the farms I know of don't have fences. They seem to pull
> >> in lots of crops.
> >
> >   Really?  I think I'll just go over there and get me some.  Who says
> > whats wild and what is the farmers property?
>
> That they don't have fences does not mean that it is open access for
> all.  I've lived in communities where fences were against building codes
> for a few reasons.  One, they are unsightly and block people's view.
> Two, they impeded the wildlife of the area.  Lots of farms (rather than
> ranches) don't have them as it makes it easier to get access to the crop
> areas with the farming equipment.  Ranches have some fences to contain
> the animals so they can be tracked and less likely to be a problem
> (cattle in the roads...)


  ok... I think you may be missing my point here.  I'm not sure if
Hans is trying to drive home some point, or hes trying to look daft by
throwing wingnuts around.  The point is, whether you have a physical
fence or not, there are boundaries.  One of the most basic, if not the
most basic, form of property is land.  Most anthropologists beleive
that our concepts of land ownership were introduced with the advent of
agriculture.  The basic thing to establish is that, no farmer is going
to invest in cultivating crops unless he is offered some kind of
assurance that the land he works is his, or his /property/.  Call it a
fence, call it a boundary, whatever you want.

  now, what we are currently trying to do is to extend our concept of
property to the world of ideas.  Its not really a new development, as
copyright has been around for a long time, however its introduction
does appear to coincide with the beginning of 'modernism'.  However
the current crisis is that we are starting to realize that were not
dealing with land here, but we are treating it as such.  But, some of
the aspects persist... no one is going to cultivate land, or in our
case /ideas/, or /software/ or /art/, unless they know it will be
their property.  So if we cease to support the notion of ideas as
property... will production cease?

  -jmz