Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Intellectual Property
I was asked to give my own definition of intellectual property but I am not sure what this even means. If I had to take a guess on what intellectual property was I would say that it has to do with someones personal thoughts or creative words. According to dictionary.com intellectual property means, property that results from original creative thought, as patents, copyright material, and trademarks. Some examples of intellectual property from academic or everyday life are an authors novel, possibly a professors lecture because it is their own thoughts and it cant be copied, also a music artist lyrics or songs. I was asked to answer the question on how does the concept of intellectual property change when it can be manipulated and shared and I think that it can never be manipulated because it would be plagiarism. You cant take someones own thoughts and change them into your own. You can although take what they are talking about and make your own intellectual property from that.
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Hi Lindsay,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post on intellectual property. I am sure that I responded to this post before, but I guess I didn't.
Your definition of intellectual property is correct. However, manipulation of intellectual property is only plagiarism if credit is not given to the original creator, the copyright owner does not give permission to do so.
Manipulation of intellectual property takes place all the time. For example, a person who published a book used photographs of Grateful Dead concert posters from the 1970s to illustrate a point in their book. Grateful Dead sued the publisher, but the publisher actually won the case. The publisher won because 1) the posters, originally made in the 1970s, were advertising a concert that had already happened, and therefore the Grateful Dead could not lose money from the use of these photos; 2) the posters were not their original size in the book, but shrunk down; 3) text accompanied the posters to provide some kind of explanation as to why these posters were related to the author's point; 4) the author never claimed that he was the creator of those posters...credit was still given to the creators of those posters.
Transformative works (which some people consider plagiarism) are a whole study within themselves. We will be seeing more and more of them as time goes on.
Sincerely,
Professor Wexelbaum