Comments on: Stupid is as Stupid Does

By: Mike Madison

Mike Madison — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 02:49:50 +0000

Patents and copyrights (and other legal forms) are designed things and bearers of meaning, and they inhabit ecologies of their own just as inventions and works of authorship do. That's one of the points of my forthcoming Things and Law, and one of the points of my earlier Reconstructing the Software License, 35 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 275 (2003).

By: MT

MT — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 16:42:16 +0000

Ah. Thanks. One more clarification? When you say “consider how we might consider copyrights and patents, as well as trademarks, in similar terms” I don’t see the parallel you’re asking us to pursue…unless I can substitute “intellectual property” for your phrase “copyrights and patents, as well as trademarks.” i.e. Your point is obscure to me when I read you to be talking about the trusty legal mechanism that is patenting, but clear enough if I read you talking about the innovations we patent. Maybe you’d like my metaphorical-anthropological scheme for thinking about IP.
http://murkythoughts.blogspot.com/2005/11/ship-sea-intellectual-sphere.html

By: Mike Madison

Mike Madison — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:10:56 +0000

He misquoted Lear, but if you read his post, he knew that already. He got the meaning right: The point of the quotation is that (in modern terms) a functionalist approach to meaning fails to describe the full complexity of the human condition.

By: MT

MT — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 03:01:12 +0000

I guess I’m stupid too, or at least ignorant. Are you saying he misquoted or that he got the meaning wrong in his paraphrase? What does Lear actually mean? I can’t tell from the snippet. Not everybody is fluent in the plays and/or speaks Elizabethan.