Monday, April 28, 2008

Lets Talk Legalities

Lucy posted in an early blog about legalities and brought up the idea of information sharing, and its legality. The idea of making it illegal to share information is unfathomable and yet I live amongst it and am actively taking part in it right now as I attend this virtual discussion for a class and an education that, when all is said and done will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So what is it that we are telling people when information can only be given and shared with those who have money enough to afford it? We look down harshly on countries like China that are well known for their piracy but once you meet the people, the students that are using pirated software, downloading pirated movies and listening to illegally downloaded music you come to the realization that this is the only way for them to leave the city they live in or the school they are at because they have neither the means nor the money to do it any other way. And now we want to take this away from them? Why? So they can go back to only having what their government gives them? So we can keep them ignorant because they don’t have the means to fatten our already exploding pockets? Is keeping a country or people from accessing a world and information not offered to them by other pathways really worth the few dollars an individual would pay that would only see the corporate account with only a few cents trickling down to anyone who actually did the work?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I found this topic very interested because I will be attending law school in the fall. With this in mind, I am beginning to realize that the field of intellectual property is not going anywhere anytime soon. The more we expand the internet, the more opportunities there are for users to gain information. The problems I have with the internet is that people either want information to be completely open source or put legal restrictions on what ideas can be absorbed by users. People should instead use the ideas found online, but credit the creators of these ideas as best they can.

The topic of legality is especially related to the article about the cultural theory of YouTube. Having used YouTube many times, I know how easy it is to pirate videos posted on the site and either edit them or keep them on your hard drive. What is most troubling is the idea that a large corporation could take some of these creative videos and use them for their marketing. I know that when Apple decided to buy the rights to the YouTube video a student posted about the iPhone, many people were impressed with their morals. Does anyone have any other ideas about the sharing of information?