Title: Your Letters - The Editor's Replies

Dear C Vu Editor,

One problem with Intellectual Property is that the law is in flux, with people by and large wanting less and shorter, and corporations by and large wanting more and longer.

One reason for corporations wanting things that most people do not is that the majority shareholders of most companies are not people. The majority shareholders of most companies are other companies. The money that is used for this share-holding comes from and is in some sense owned by members of the public in the final analysis (as credit in bank accounts, pension fund payments, insurance premiums etc.), but the members of the public in question have almost no say over which shares are selected for investment.

I want to make it clear that in my belief, the banks, pension funds and such which are the majority shareholders in other corporations are also majority owned by other corporations, so this situation is recursive, I am not sure it is exactly infinitely recursive, but it seems to go to any depth you care to pursue it, and in most cases it never bottoms out at an ultimate human shareholder. If that is correct, it seems to be the case that Capitalism died a while back, without anybody noticing.

Given that the shareholders can sue a CEO personally (above and beyond firing him/her) for failure to make enough profit (in the USA at least), it seems to me that the controlling interest of most corporations is not human.

Microsoft seems to be an exception to this, given the personal holdings of Bill Gates and other founders and the shares issued to employees, and small companies that are entirely owned by their proprietors certainly are, but in terms of financial worth the latter at least are a small minority.

Interestingly, the tendency seems to be for corporations to demand that the professional conduct you espoused in C Vu 12/6 be overridden (at all levels) by the law.

Companies, in the USA particularly, but elsewhere too, are looking to expand their assets by doing a minimum of work and spending minimal money.

One of the ways of expanding a company's assets is to claim and hold intellectual property. That ranges from copyright, to patents, to customer databases.

I am sure others will have a lot to say on the evils and merits of intellectual property, so I will leave it there.

Best Wishes

Richard Court