via boingboing.net

"Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not."

• First, the stuff we cover with intellectual property rights has certain vital differences from the stuff we cover with tangible property rights. Partly because of those differences, Jefferson, like most of his successors in the United States, does not see intellectual property as a claim of natural right based on expended labor. Instead it is a temporary state-created monopoly given to encourage further innovation.

• Second, there is no "entitlement" to have an intellectual property right. Such rights may or may not be given as a matter of social "will and convenience" without "claim or complaint from any body."

• Third, intellectual property rights are not and should not be permanent; in fact they should be tightly limited in time and should not last a day longer than necessary to encourage the innovation in the first place.

• Fourth, a linked point, they have considerable monopolistic dangers--they may well produce more "embarrassment than advantage." In fact, since intellectual property rights potentially restrain the benevolent tendency of "ideas . . . [to] freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man," they may in some cases actually hinder rather than encourage innovation.

• Fifth, deciding whether to have an intellectual property system is only the first choice in a long series.¹³ Even if one believes that intellectual property is a good idea, which I firmly do, one will still have the hard job of saying which types of innovation or information are "worth to the public the embarrassment" of an exclusive right, and of drawing the limits of that right.

"It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."

So if Chrysler has 40,800 people and only 22,000 of them actually make cars, while the rest are involved in mostly non-value adding other things, that is a problem.  But the really startling number in the filing is that Chrysler has 3,200 dealers which employee 140,000 people. 140,000 people working at dealerships and 22,000 people making cars???  It takes more than 6 people to sell and service a Chrysler for every 1 needed to build a Chrysler.  How bad is a Chrysler if it takes that many people to convince people to buy one, then to keep it running?

The birthrates of Muslim women in Europe--and around the world--have been falling significantly for some time. Data on birthrates among different religious groups in Europe are scarce, but they point in a clear direction. Between 1990 and 2005, for example, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish- born women from 3.2 to 1.9. In 1970, Turkish- born women in Germany had on average two children more than German- born women. By 1996, the difference had fallen to one child, and it has now dropped to half that number.

The falling fertility rates in large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having more babies. [.. ] Sweden's fertility rate jumped eight percent in 2004 and stayed put. Both Britain and France now project that their populations will rise from the current 60 million each to more than 75 million by mid century. 

In Britain, the number of births rose in 2007 for the sixth year in a row. Britain's fertility rate has increased from 1.6 to 1.9 in just six years, with a striking contribution from women in their thirties and forties-- just the kind of hard-to-predict behavioral change that drives demographers wild. The fertility rate is at its highest level since 1980.