Darl McBride, SCO Group's president and CEO, said in an InformationWeek article:
The Linux business model was bound to change, and some people are having a hard time accepting this, he says. "The whole concept of getting something for nothing just doesn't hold up," he says. "The notion that you're going to run a Fortune 1,000 company on something that in the end could be more like Napster than an enterprise software system, it's a big question mark."
and Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America, responded on PBS's Online Newshour:
... Intellectual property should not be treated any differently than other property. ...
Each comment is wrong, and although they approach the question of the legal status of intellectual property in different ways, both opinions share a remarkably anti-social attitude towards the free exchange of thought (meaning thoughts, ideas, knowledge, information, memes, etc.), as well as also being short-sightedly ignorant about the economic benefits of this free exchange.
Both speakers are essentially arguing that all thoughts (the products of thinking) should be ownable, but what would happen if they all were? How would people learn? How would there be further innovations? How would society benefit from this arrangement, and if society at large didn't benefit, how would individuals benefit either?
It may sound noble and reasonable to say that people should be able to capitalize on their own thoughts, but treating every idea as a commodifiable entity isn't a good idea in the long run. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that all people would have to make enough money on the economic exploitation of their own ideas to be able to afford the exposure to others'. Innovation would ground to a halt because no one could be sure that their breakthrough would really have occurred in a vacuum (and of course it wouldn't, because few innovations ever occur in a vacuum).
McBride's sour grapes aside, Linux is a great example of the greater value EVERYONE gets to enjoy when ideas are shared. In the commodified-idea world there would be no Linux, and megapolies would own all of the intellectual tools (software, books, music, art, etc.) and everyone would be stuck with that. Including Oppenheim and McBride. It's in society's interest to buck the commodification trend, and the Oppenheims and McBrides of the world should hope that their rhetoric is resisted. If it is, in the end we will all be much richer.