"Possible component of a device that would make a lot of heat for smelting more iron and steel.  I'm wondering if we can skip coal mining and go straight to... an analogue of fire that requires much higher starting temperatures and produces much greater amounts of heat when something burns.  That might work if magic can take a fixed quantity of heat and focus it down into a small enough volume that the local temperatures are incredibly high, like thousands of times higher than molten iron; and I've already verified that somebody from this world didn't seem to have the corresponding basic knowledge to know what the underlying constituents of matter were or how to burn them, so it's the sort of thing that nobody here might have tried yet.  Oh, but don't try that on your own until we've all nailed down equity distributions and intellectual property so I can explain further details.  It's legitimately dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."

Basic physical principles should plausibly be given away as gifts, because it's hard to make nonrival information-goods excludable and they're too necessary for others making basic research contributions, but specific inventions should still be charged-for.  Keltham might feel differently about it, if he'd personally discovered all of the relevant physical principles.  But in fact Keltham is carrying a lot of dath-ilan-produced information that he got for free, and that dath ilan would have preferred him to spread around; and he is, as he has just contemplated, honorable even in the dark.

The idea that there's an analogue of fire, that burns things if you get the starting temperature high enough, and yields much more energy - for that matter, the idea of binding energies and mass defects for nuclei - should under this policy be given away for free.  Knowing that you can extract hydrogen from water and burn that in particular - or hydrogen and boron, if they can get the temperatures high enough, it would be safer and less radioactive to do inside a steel furnace - seems more in the realm of specific inventions that he could charge for.

Or actually... given some of the weirder exotic effects he's seen in the spells, maybe he should more privately at some point talk about squeezing down some 'impenetrable' wall of force around liquid hydrogen until the whole thing fuses, for purposes of trying to destroy the Worldwound?  Actually he'd first need to ask whether enormous explosions would have any effect on the Worldwound at all.

"Possible component of a device that would make a lot of heat for smelting more iron and steel.  I'm wondering if we can skip coal mining and go straight to... an analogue of fire that requires much higher starting temperatures and produces much greater amounts of heat when something burns.  That might work if magic can take a fixed quantity of heat and focus it down into a small enough volume that the local temperatures are incredibly high, like thousands of times higher than molten iron; and I've already verified that somebody from this world didn't seem to have the corresponding basic knowledge to know what the underlying constituents of matter were or how to burn them, so it's the sort of thing that nobody here might have tried yet.  Oh, but don't try that on your own until we've all nailed down equity distributions and intellectual property so I can explain further details.  It's legitimately dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."

Basic physical principles should plausibly be given away as gifts, because it's hard to make nonrival information-goods excludable and they're too necessary for others making basic research contributions, but specific inventions should still be charged-for.  Keltham might feel differently about it, if he'd personally discovered all of the relevant physical principles.  But in fact Keltham is carrying a lot of dath-ilan-produced information that he got for free, and that dath ilan would have preferred him to spread around; and he is, as he has just contemplated, honorable even in the dark.

The idea that there's an analogue of fire, that burns things if you get the starting temperature high enough, and yields much more energy - for that matter, the idea of binding energies and mass defects for nuclei - should under this policy be given away for free.  Knowing that you can extract hydrogen from water and burn that in particular - or hydrogen and boron, if they can get the temperatures high enough, that would be safer and less radioactive to do inside a steel furnace - seems more in the realm of specific inventions that he could charge for.

Or actually... given some of the weirder exotic effects he's seen in the spells, maybe he should more privately at some point talk about squeezing down some 'impenetrable' wall of force around liquid hydrogen until the whole thing fuses, for purposes of trying to destroy the Worldwound?  Actually he'd first need to ask whether enormous explosions would have any effect on the Worldwound at all.

"Possible component of a device that would make a lot of heat for smelting more iron and steel.  I'm wondering if we can skip coal mining and go straight to... an analogue of fire that requires much higher starting temperatures and produces much greater amounts of heat when something burns.  That might work if magic can take a fixed quantity of heat and focus it down into a small enough volume that the local temperatures are incredibly high, like thousands of times higher than molten iron; and I've already verified that somebody from this world didn't seem to have the corresponding basic knowledge to know what the underlying constituents of matter were or how to burn them, so it's the sort of thing that nobody here might have tried yet.  Oh, but don't try that on your own until we've all nailed down equity distributions and intellectual property so I can explain further details.  It's legitimately dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."

Basic physical principles should plausibly be given away as gifts, because it's hard to make them excludable and they're too necessary for others making basic research contributions, but specific inventions should still be charged-for - is Keltham's current thought.  Keltham might feel differently about it, if he'd personally discovered all of the relevant physical principles.  But in fact Keltham is carrying a lot of dath-ilan-produced information that he got for free, and that dath ilan would have preferred him to spread around; and he is, as he has just contemplated, honorable even in the dark.

The idea that there's an analogue of fire, that burns things if you get the starting temperature high enough, and yields much more energy - for that matter, the idea of binding energies and mass defects for nuclei - should under this policy be given away for free.  Knowing that you can extract hydrogen from water and burn that in particular - or hydrogen and boron, if they can get the temperatures high enough, that would be safer and less radioactive to do inside a steel furnace - seems more in the realm of specific inventions that he could charge for.

Or actually... given some of the weirder exotic effects he's seen in the spells, maybe he should more privately at some point talk about squeezing down some 'impenetrable' wall of force around liquid hydrogen until the whole thing fuses, for purposes of trying to destroy the Worldwound?  Actually he'd first need to ask whether enormous explosions would have any effect on the Worldwound at all.

"Possible component of a device that would make a lot of heat for smelting more iron and steel.  I'm wondering if we can skip coal mining and go straight to... an analogue of fire that requires much higher starting temperatures and produces much greater amounts of heat when something burns.  That might work if magic can take a fixed quantity of heat and focus it down into a small enough volume that the local temperatures are incredibly high, like thousands of times higher than molten iron; and I've already verified that somebody from this world didn't seem to have the corresponding basic knowledge to know what the underlying constituents of matter were or how to burn them, so it's the sort of thing that nobody here might have tried yet.  Oh, but don't try that on your own until we've all nailed down equity distributions and intellectual property so I can explain further details.  It's legitimately dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."

Basic physical principles should plausibly be given away as gifts, because it's hard to make them excludable and they're too necessary for others making basic research contributions, but specific inventions should still be charged-for - is Keltham's current thought.  Keltham might feel differently about it, if he'd personally discovered all of the relevant physical principles.  But in fact Keltham is carrying a lot of dath-ilan-produced information that he got for free, and that dath ilan would have preferred him to spread around; and he is, as he has just contemplated, honorable even in the dark.

The idea that there's an analogue of fire, that burns things if you get the starting temperature high enough, and yields much more energy - for that matter, the idea of binding energies and mass defects for nuclei - should under this policy be given away for free.  Knowing that you can extract hydrogen from water and burn that in particular - or hydrogen and boron, if they can get the temperatures high enough, that would be safer and less radioactive to do inside a steel furnace - seems more in the realm of specific inventions that he could charge for.

Or actually... given some of the weirder exotic effects he's seen in the spells, maybe he should more privately at some point talk about squeezing down some 'impenetrable' wall of force around a bigger mass of liquid hydrogen until the whole thing fuses, for purposes of trying to destroy the Worldwound?  Actually he'd first need to ask whether enormous explosions would have any effect on the Worldwound at all.