You, DDeBar, wrote:

>My earlier post wasn't clearly written; I apologize.
Actually I think I was agreeing with you!
>
>What I wanted to say was that in many cases, taxpayers fund the r&d
>process, whether directly or by tax benefit. Also, gov't contracts
>guarantee an income stream, making some otherwise speculative endeavors
>less so. Finally, in many cases, we end up guinea pigs (particularly in the
>field of medicine). At the end of this process, someone else gets a
>proprietary interest in the product.
>
>NASA always boasts about the spinoff technologies from space exploration.
>What is our equity position in these tecnologies? Didn't we pay for their
>development? Didn't we guarantee a market for them? Didn't we live (or
>should I say, don't we live) with the risks of them (the Cassini project
>comes to mind...)? Does this risk assumption differ so much from that of
>the corporate employer that the distribution of benefits should differ so?
All true. At least 3 points: 1) IP laws are necessarily crude; 2) they
are a pragmatic policy designed to stimulate innovation, not necessarily
a statement of the just distribution of property rights; 3) no one has
sugested a better alternative.

Chomsky has periodicallly cited computers as an example of
state-subsidized technology, as computers of course had their roots in
the R&D of the Military-Industrial Complex. True enough. But look at the
results. I am not upset that public funds helped water the seeds of
current computer technology. I am typing this on a computer that would
blow away ENIAC, sits on my desk, and costs less than a month's pay.
Along the way businesses made money: so what? (To be clear, I have
entirely different feelings about military spending per se.) Can anyone
say that profit margins on the hardware side of things are
monopolistically high? Tell it to Apple. This seems to be a success story
to me: government got high-tech started, then it became self-sustaining,
and society benefited. If, in the 50s the government had been
straightforward about it and said, it's a choice between publicly
subsidized high-tech and no high-tech at all, I think most people would
have said, by all means, subsidize high-tech!