Creativity is one of the God's gifts that not everyone could have. Anything that we created through the imagination of our mind is called intellectual property. In Spinello's CyberEthics: Morality and Law in Cyberspace Third Edition, "[i]ntellectual property consists of intellectual objects, such as original musical compositions, poems, novels, inventions, product formulas, and so forth" (Spinello pg. 94). Also, symbols, names and images are the examples of intellectual property.
Copyright, with symbol © is an idea that provides ownership and exclusive rights to the creator of a creative and original work to manage its distribution for a certain time period. However, if the copyright is not renewed, the works will enter public domain. Copyright always comes with the phrase 'All Rights Reserved' which means that all rights of the author's property are reserved. This means that if anyone steal or use the ideas of the author without his or her permission will be in a huge trouble. If the author finds out that someone uses his idea and publishes it, the author has the right to sue or brings the person to the court. As Prof Perry discussed in the class, there are two different views of Copyright Law. One view from Lawrence Lessig and the other view are from big media companies. Lessig agrees with this law, yet there should be a limitation for this. He said so because he wants to encourage individuals to be creative and innovative, and to do that, is by letting people know that they will get money for their hard work. I agree with no doubt with his opinion. On the other hand, the big media companies want to extend copyright as long as possible. The issue that I want to highlight here, is the extension of copyright, good for a long run to every people if there is no limit as what Lessig said?
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Many of us, in this class, keep thinking of intellectual property as related only to copyright law and code. And it seems to me that we have avoided other ways of regulating behavior in regarding intellectual property namely by the norms. My friend, who is now studying at the University of Illinois once, told me that his friend had been denied access to the Internet through campus connection. It turns out that the IT people found out that he had downloaded music illegally online. I think Vanderbilt must have certain policies too regarding illegal music downloading, but I'm not sure. But I do know that ITS do encourage the students to access legal alternatives such as Ruckus and Joost. Just as the copyright law's purpose is to protect intellectual property, the norms that illegal music downloading will result in denial of certain benefit (such as Internet access), don't you think that people will respect the law more than they do today?
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