Intellectual Property

[nakulgupta 0]

The Internet is like the Wild wild west where every other unethical activity is probable and to a large extent possible. The world wide web has enabled people to share huge amounts of information and gain knowledge at an immense rate but the question that arises is does sharing your intellectual property on the Internet deprives you from its copyright, does it give the right to other people to copy it and use it without mentioning your hard work?Well, apparently according to both US and Indian (still somewhat in its infancy) laws the answer is not affirmative. But there is always the glowing loophole, that same path which saves the criminal from going behind the bars and the path is nothing but the fact that criminal copyright laws hold that people who are making financial profits from your intellectual property without your knowledge can only be held responsible for infringement of the desired laws.However, this does not stop the rampant copying of a website's material to other sites, forums, chat rooms and other places. Since, this is admittedly not done for profit, the person cannot be called a criminal.Thus, if one fine day you see your work flashed on some forum or website without the least mention of your name, don't blame the person who did it, blame the laws that govern us.

[vizskywalker 0]

Actually, because of the internet's effect on published work, the U.S. has very good laws about intellectual property. As soon as text or an image is published in the U.S., in any form, on paper or online, it becomes the intellectual property of the publisher and the publisher may mark it with the word Copyright (not the © symbol, just the word). If work published in the U.S. is on someone else's website, it is that person's fault, not U.S. law. (I can't speak for India.) http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

~Viz

[tcave 0]

I think sharing information like that on the internet should NEVER be outlawed because the person sharing the information shares it at his/her own riskand if they don't think about all the risks involved before they send it to the public, then it's their own fault for being naiive

[MajesticTreeFrog 0]

The current issues around intellectual property are larks. The problem is not that people are engaged in piracy or that people have file sharing. The problem is that for a long time a few organizations/cartels controlled IP distribution around the world. They did this because there was no more efficient, decentralized manner of doing this. As a result, artists had to go through gatekeeper organizations like record labels and movie studios to get their work seen or heard by a large audience. Now that this has changed, the large labels are no longer needed. As a result they are screaming and whining about the new world that is consigning them to the dustbin of history.Nothing to see here, move along.

[vizskywalker 0]

Tcave, that is like saying that if I publish a book, and someone wants to copy it and pass on that information without crediting me, for or not for their profit, then that is perfectly okay. The internet is just another way of publishing something, except it reaches a larger audience than books and cuts out the middle man. The only alternative is to not publish anything at all. If no one's intellectual property is respected online, then people will not publish online. That's the way things go.~Viz