The New York Times has some great letters rebutting Mark Helprin's piece I mentioned yesterday. It's great to see so many citizens understanding the . Some letters talk about the non-exclusionary nature of ideas: "If I invent a better way to tie my shoes, my use is not compromised by others tying their shoes in the same way. But this must be balanced against the benefit of incentives that encourage me to discover new ways to tie a shoe."

Others attack the economic arguments, and others draw historical analogies to Mark Twain, whose work is so well known because it is in the public domain but who, ironically, also made the same (bad) argument 101 years earlier.