Sent 22 September 2008, via http://www.theatlantic.com/a/submissions.mhtml:

Corby Kummer, in his otherwise excellent article "Half a Loaf" (Oct 2008), makes a common mistake by confusing copyright with attribution.  While it is objectionable when a cookbook reprints someone else's recipe without crediting them -- especially when that person spent effort on perfecting the recipe -- neither copyrights nor patents are the solution to the problem.

Copyright is just a monopoly on replication: it's the right to prevent others from distributing copies of something (a text, say, or a song), regardless of whether they give credit or not.  And patents are monopolies on ideas: a patent on a bread recipe means that no one else can bake that bread, except for certain educational or research purposes, without paying the patent holder's licensing terms.  But a patent would not prevent exchanging the recipe itself, nor do anything to enforce accurate attribution.

Finally, trademark grants a monopoly on the use of a name.  While trademark law does not prevent me from manufacturing a drink exactly like Coca-Cola, it does prevent me from selling it under the name "Coca-Cola".  Trademarks are the closest we come to a law concerned purely with identity and attribution.

Unfortunately, the catch-all term "intellectual property" only promotes confusion between these unrelated monopolies.  This confusion is mercilessly exploited by the industries that have the most to gain from highly restrictive copyright and patent laws.  For example, although copyright was originally designed to support the nascent printing industry, by granting publishers a temporary monopoly on what they printed, today's content industries have vastly extended both the length and the scope of copyrights, in part by arguing that all those poor, hardworking artists deserve credit for their work -- even though copyright is not about credit (that's why it's called "copyright", not "creditright"), and was not designed to support artists.

Later in the article, Kummer beautifully demonstrates why a permissive attitude toward sharing information is better for everyone: because Jim Lahey did not try for a patent, all bakers benefit from his no-knead method -- which, as Kummer takes care to show, was itself built on prior art, like virtually all inventions.

With the invention of the Internet (another technology made possible by the fact that key pieces were or became unpatented), we now have a world-wide, zero-cost copying machine, and we should allow ourselves to use it to its full capacity.  By all means, let us preserve attribution, by law if custom alone proves insufficient.  We should at the same time encourage copying, so those attributions can spread as far and wide as the works to which they are attached.

-Karl Fogel
 Editor, QuestionCopyright.org