Forget spreading the wealth, how about spreading the intellectual property rights?

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From a young age, we are all taught not to steal. It is easy to see how stealing your neighbor’s bicycle is wrong. Your neighbor has a bicycle, you take it, now your neighbor does not have a bicycle.

But in the digital world, things are different. Let’s say your neighbor is a musician and releases some new music. If you steal that music you are just copying it; your neighbor still has his original music and you just have a copy. It might seem like no harm is done. But it is still stealing, and it is still wrong to steal. It is wrong for both legal and ethical reasons.

That was an oversimplified example, but the point is valid. Or is it? Feel free to disagree with anything I write. I can handle it.

Speech by Edward Felten

Technological innovations have always changed how people think about the world. It takes time for some to adapt to new inventions. Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton, explained in his speech “Rip, mix, burn, sue” that in 1906 a man testified before Congress that the phonograph would threaten the artistic development of music. Felten also described how in the 1970s, television network executives felt threatened by cable television and the invention of VCRs, which would allow people to record programs, then watch them whenever they want and skip the commercials. Skipping commercials can lead to a loss of advertising revenue, so the networks felt threatened and talked about copyright infringement. In the current decade, the talk has been about TiVo allowing people to skip commercials, and how entire TV programs are available on youtube and other similar sites, even if that material is copyrighted.

from TiVo.com

In the documentary “Steal this Film II”, directed by Jamie King and produced by The League of Noble Peers, (the title scene is shown here), a number of experts weighed in on these issues of copyright laws and the Internet as a way for people to copy and share anything now that everything can be digitized and put on the web. One expert from the documentary quoted Getty as saying: “Intellectual property rights is the oil of the 21st century.” As an example of the conflict between copyright holders versus the common people, tens of thousands of people have been sued by record companies because they shared copyrighted songs on the Internet, according to the documentary.

The conflict between protecting copyrighted material and sharing artistic works comes from two human characteristics. The first characteristic is the desire to protect that which you created, whether it is music, a painting or a story you wrote for the newspaper you work for. The second characteristic is the desire humans have to share what they have with others. It is our capacity for sharing that allows civilization to exist. If we hear a great song, we naturally want to share that song with our friends so they can enjoy it too. But these two human characteristics are at odds with each other.

What is a journalist to do in this new digital world while we wait for the legal and ethical rules to catch up with the technological innovations? First, respect the works of others, and never take something without permission or giving full credit where the credit is due. Secondly, be aware of the current property rights laws, and do not infringe on copyrighted material. Thirdly, as a writer, imagine how you would feel if someone took ideas or words from something you wrote and passed it off as his or her own ideas. You would not like that, so make sure you don’t do that to anyone else.

Plagiarism has been around since long before the Internet, and honest journalists and legitimate news organizations must learn how best to navigate through the sometimes-murky waters the new digital age has flooded us with. The Internet provides us with a wealth of information we can use when researching a story, but we must remain vigilant and not drift into the whirlpools of temptation that plague the World Wide Web.

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Tags: copyright laws, Edward Felten, intellectual property rights, Internet, Josh, Steal this Film II, TiVo, VCRs