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