Louis L'Amour Quotes
Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.
L'Amour, Louis. The Walking Drum. Bantam Books, 1984.
While Wikipedia has not yet reached every person in the world, it has already distributed more human knowledge than any other vehicle in human history. And all at no cost to the user. It is certainly the greatest volunteer intellectual effort in history.
Although most people do not realize it, ideas cannot be copyrighted under present and traditional copyright law. The manifestation of the idea, the specific design, words, fonts, and layout can be copyrighted, but someone else can legally use and publish that idea with a different design and words.
Two days before Nagasaki was attacked by the second atomic bomb. Bohr was afraid of a nuclear arms race, and argued for the release of all scientific information. His suggestion went nowhere. There was a 50 year nuclear arms race.
This doctrine of law was settled, but in the technological and digital age some people have tried to extend the intellectual property doctrine to include some ideas if they idea is a procedure or a set of DNA instructions. Meanwhile, the legal doctrine has been and is, as stated by Brandeis in this quotation, is that new and original ideas are not intellectual property and are always in the public domain, no matter how original.
Louis Dearborn L'Amour was an American novelist and short-story writer. His books consisted primarily of Western novels (though he called his work "frontier stories"); however, he also wrote historical fiction (The Walking Drum), science fiction (Haunted Mesa), non-fiction (Frontier), as well as poetry and short-story collections. Many of his stories were made into films. L'Amour's books remain popular and most have gone through multiple printings. At the time of his death almost all of his 105 existing works (89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction) were still in print, and he was "one of the world's most popular writers".
