The Rules of Blogging

The thought of intertwining public and private lives was last on our mind. When this takes place our deepest and innermost thoughts are easily broadcasted to the entire world, with the click of a mouse. Should those thoughts that originated within each individual brain then be considered personal or public property to the masses?

Categorization seems to be the main method in which digital intellectual property is coded as personal, or public, but for a majority of ideas and topics it is not as simple as categorizing and coding, as black or white. For many policy makers this has been taken on as the task of a lifetime, finally defining broad intellectual property rights, and then moving in on them to narrow the scope. It seems as though they are so caught up in this challenge they could care less about any specific intellectual property being safeguarded, but rather the fight for it to be done.

It boggles my mind to think that one day digital thoughts, ideas and objects will all have a tie to some person or group. Where is the possibility for growth in that, when each person puts a claim to some basic human thought or idea? Technology has replaced the jobs of a large number of human beings. If these schemes of protecting digital objects came about it is possible that new jobs may need to be filled, to monitor and apprehend individuals in violation of piracy and re-sale of digital intellectual property.

“Fair Use” has such a highly subjective interpretation for its application and involvement with education and law which have been around forever. It seems hasty to attempt to put it into use for intellectual property, an idea so complex and abstract, when we cannot even set a basic foundation and ground rules for the idea. At the same time, despite how ambiguous it has proven to be in a variety of situations “Fair Use” is also essential to our ability to share ideas through quotations, paraphrases, copyright, etc.

In the grand scheme of things, the hope is that experience will yield an answer to the application of “fair use”, but with technological advances making way at rapid speed it seems to be clouding the idea more than ever before. To illustrate this “The History of Creative Commons” describes a situation as simple as one lending a book to another. Then being begrudged by the fact that it was copied while in the other individual’s possession. The overall judgment after the dispute had escalated was, “To every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy”. Now imagine if that judgment had stuck, we would all be uneducated, uninformed and naive of the enormous wealth of knowledge available out there through the use of copyright, which has been highly developed throughout the years.

Almost every educator discloses the crucial statement “make sure you cite your sources” before sending you on your way to do any type of assignment. I can vouch that throughout the years I have made countless works cited pages, but without truly taking the time to gain sufficient knowledge or understanding of what exactly copyright was.

As stated in the constitution, copyright is meant to promote the progress of knowledge and learning, but it is rather interesting to find that this has taken a turn towards a financial goal and aspect of monopolizing the system. Obviously a balance between keeping work private and public is essential, but to what extent will we as individuals go to both protect our own work, but at the same time have access and the ability to utilize others work as well?

~ by Shelby Iverson on January 14, 2012.