Ethics and Law in New Media : Week 7

Read Chapter 3 "Against Intellectual Property", write a review and comment on his strategies for change.

In the chapter “Against Intellectual Property” Brian Martin explores the problems that face the security of various kinds of intellectual property and proposes solutions to this complex issue. To his mind, information should be freely accessible to everyone without legal barriers and the privacy related issues, for instance, copyright and patents can be easily avoided and it wouldn’t harm the authors of the creative work.

The question about the privacy of intellectual property and the attempts to secure it lie far back in the past, starting from the invention of the first copy machines and patents for evolutionary inventions, such as, telephone and radio. Many aspects of the intellectual property rights are controversial, for example, the ownership of government information and person’s biological information. The real life cases as well as frequent disputes about intellectual property issues make us think that the secret aim of protecting one’ s intellectual work is not the question of promoting the creation of new ideas, but rather is a cruel way of power division.

Author also closely examines the concept of the marketplace of ideas. This theory compares the economic perception of a free market with the freedom of speech and expression. The concept of this metaphor is not fully approved by the author, because there are too many restrictions in real in real life to make this comparison plausible. The inequality between different members of society denies the same access to information and right to express oneself for everyone. This violates the idea of a market being free and self-regulating.

Brian Martin proposes various strategies that would change the situation in this complex field:

• Change thinking – increase in social responsibility in the society, spread of the idea of freedom of speech

• Expose the costs – the costs of having a sophisticated system of intellectual property rights are often higher that the benefits of it

• Reproduce protected works – think of plagiarism as stealing, very often the root of this problem lies in the governmental level

• Openly refuse to cooperate with intellectual property – challenge the society, spread the message and see who will follow

• Promote non-owned information – for example, use public domains, free software instead of stealing the one that is not for free. Copyleft – opposite of copyright

• Develop principles to deal with credit for intellectual work

  All these strategies are very good guidelines every modern and socially responsible person should follow. The long lasting period of intellectual property rights are about to change soon due to rapid changes in human lifestyle in the last couple of decades. In the times when everything can be downloaded very fast from everywhere int he world, the concept of intellectual property needs to grow to anew level, otherwise the current conditions would make it disappear completely.