Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
For instance that simian society has always had ways
of restricting access to intellectual property, not
limited to intentional obfuscation, initiatory methods
of knowledge access, and going all the way to the level
of intentionally making the information transmitted
faulty, just so you would have to make the leap of
intellectual discovery as to what precise way the
mechanism in question worked. Copyright *did* in fact
enable people to spell out in full detail what they had
discovered, because they had a reasonable expectation
that even if they didn't only pass on their knowledge to
their apprentices, somebody would protect their ability
to milk it for all it was worth...
What you are describing here is really about patents rather than
copyrights. Patents protect ideas on behalf of the exploiters;
copyrights only protect the way they are expressed.
Ec