Friday, December 18, 2009

E&L: week7: The Author vs the Information Society

Brian Martin discusses in the 3rd chapter of his book Ínformation Liberation' the problems with Intellectual Property. According to Martin, challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals.

His strategies for improving: Change thinking; Expose the costs; Reproduce protected work; Openly refuse to cooperate with intellectual property; Promote non-owned information; Develop principles for crediting intellectual work.
I agree that the way of thinking has much power and influence to everything - including framing are thoughts in legislation.
Exposing the costs is in the interest of reducing the legitimacy of the world intellectual property system.
Reproduce protected work - I think this is the hardest part. Ofcourse it is not fair to reproduce smb's work freely but it would be really difficult to set up a penalty-system. Martin compares illegal copying with theft. There are so much information around us, so it is quite hard to "stay clean". Therefore I like Martin's idea to hold as much information as possible free by sharing it wisely.
I definately agree to the strategy 'Openly refuse to cooperate with intellectual property'. Being open-minded in whatever field helps to understand the rules better and to stick to them.


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