From this 26 April 2001 article written by Tom Nadeau:

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In the classic model of a few hundred years ago, the assumption behind intellectual property law was that there would be a handful of innovators, surrounded by hordes of mindless consumers of such information-based products.

The assumption behind the model is that there are innovators who are not consumers, and consumers who are not innovators. That is, it is assumed that consumers will never be information-producing agents themselves.

What does this mean to the structure of society? It means that major corporations that form the first link in the innovation chain are using legal restrictions to claim every link in the sequential-innovation process — and these corporations have the gall to claim that they are only protecting an elite few “innovators” without whom the rest of us would be impoverished imbeciles.

That is the new big lie of the information era. We ALL have the tools for innovation and creativity right now, on our desktops and within our portable computers. We ALL have the capacity to be producers of ideas, not merely consumers of them.

As seen in this Slashdot post in a thread on cloning by “eries”:

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For those hollerin for cloning tech now, here’s a little story from Graham Glass’ excellent UNIX for Programmers and Users, Page 410 (SystemsProgramming, Getting a New Process: fork())

“It [fork] reminds me of a great sci-fi story I read once, about a man who comes across a fascinating booth at a circus. The vendor at the booth tells man that the booth is a matter-replicator; anyone who walks through the booth is duplicated. The original person walks out of the booth unharmed, but the duplicate person walks out onto the surface of Mars as a slave of the Martian construction crews. The vendor then tells the man that he’ll be given a million dollars if he allows himself to be replicated, and he agrees. He happily walks through the machine, looking forward to collecting the million dollars… and walks out onto the surface of Mars. Meanwhile, back on Earth, his duplicate is walking off with a stash of cash. The question is this: If you came across the booth, what would you do?”

Careful what you wish for.