Dylan Tweney blogs about my entry on plagiarism. He takes me to task for using the phrase “intellectual property” as if it were a legitimate phrase:

When you use the term “intellectual property,” you’ve already lost the argument. That term, by likening copyrights and patents to real property, gives them an implicit permanence, concreteness, and totality that they’ve never had, until now, either in the Constitution or in subsequent legal history.

I completely agree. I should have put “intellectual property” in quotes. In fact, I’ve many times said exactly what Dylan says: We lost as soon as we allowed the term to go unchallenged.

Hmm, doesn’t that mean that one of us must be a plagiarist?

Then Dave Winer takes me to task for saying, in a Darwin column, that engineers are cynical:

I don’t think of programmers as cynics, that’s too negative. I played around with the thesaurus a bit, and think cynic is the wrong word. I think the correct work is skeptic.

I suspect that Dave and I don’t actually disagree much. My column was in fact about the optimism and virtuousness of engineers, not a knock against them. But Dave’s right: In my experience, software engineers are tremendously supportive of those they respect and tremendously cynical about those they suspect. So, I should have been more explicit about the domain of discourse within which engineering cynicism generally shows up: an engineer on a sales call isn’t a mere skeptic.

Categories: Uncategorized dw