My Joel impersonation.... Reason has a fascinating article on intellectual property. It's ostensibly about the inventor of television, but this is the part I found interesting and disturbing (though not surprising):

Farnsworth is a footnote to history, but the issues his case raises are not. Consider the Texas programmer Evan Brown, who dreamed up a procedure to translate old computer code into new languages and has spent the last six years fighting for the rights to it. Because Brown worked on the idea while DSC Communications was his employer, the company (now owned by the French telecom group Alcatel) claims the rights to it, as per the contract Brown signed when he joined the firm. Brown replies that he first conceived the idea years before he went to work for DSC, that he worked on it during his own time, that it had no relation to his job at DSC, and, most important, that he didn't write it down until after he left the company's employ.

I've heard of this sort of stuff before. Sounds like these corporations basically own you. Hell, could they demand your shit as work-product since you had lunch on company premises? Or would they just assume if you were salaried that any shit you produced is corporate property by implication of you being their slave, oops, employee? How about children you produced while having sex in your office with your wife? Don't get me wrong, America is rich and prosperous in part because of corporations. But much of our recent economic growth has come from small and medium-sized businesses. In addition bureaucracies, and that's what corporations are, are rarely friends of liberty. And in the end, money is just a means toward exercising liberty. Many Saudis have a fair amount of money, but with no liberty, they need to go out of the country to enjoy it. For conservatives and libertarians who (like me) don't have a natural suspicion of the free market and corporations (well, until recently), I suggest Robert Locke's two part series on "Corporatism" (part 1 and part 2) [1]. [1] Fascism by any other name if you ask me....