Have you ever looked around yourself, felt oppressed by it all, and just wanted less? What did you do?
Radical Hobbyist
Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby… Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our own question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary.
It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Cold Copyright
Here’s an interesting thought: if someone patented (or copyrighted, or what have you) the cold virus, could they sue people for propagating their intellectual property without permission? Or could the hapless victims sue them for not keeping a dangerous virus under proper control? Of course, the very idea is ludicrous, but so are a lot of things about intellectual property law.