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Hi everybody,
how are you? Did you enjoy your Easter holidays? Hope you did! How much relaxing..no classes, nice weather and a lot of crazy friends around. I still have a life, that’s amazing! I thought I had lost it in the chaotic tangles of my academic/working life, but fortunately it didn’t happen..I’m still here! These days I had so much fun I almost forgot to update my blog..sorry, I hope you understand me:-)! It took me quite a lot to realize that holidays had already finished, time always goes on too fast! Well, let’s not think about it, better to go on! It will be hard to remember what exactly happened last week in class, but I’ll try my best to do it!
Last week we talked about Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and plagiarism.
The former is a set of laws created to protect the artistic and commercial inventions from the improper use of people, e.g. copying and modifying the original or using an image or logo to sell fake copies of something. In this way the intellectual property rights are sort of intellectual assurance people do to save their creations and to “repay” the big troubles and sacrifices they faced before making their discoveries. The most common IPR people make use of are:
Nowadays, that of intellectual property has become a burning issue, especially now that the Internet era gives people much more freedom to find and exploit resources available on the Web. The Web is an amazing source of everything; there you can find articles, essays, music and movies, which can be protected by copyright or not. Usually, when authors decide to put their work on the Web they are well aware that they’re offering it to millions of people who are probably going to read and use it for their own purposes. This is a courtesy authors do us and we should be thankful to them! One way to show our gratitude towards them is to respect their intellectual work, for instance, by quoting the authors or linking to their work. Everybody ,and we students in particular, should keep in mind that using the fruit of someone else’s troubles in an improper way, as pretending it is ours, besides being immoral, is illegal too, though here in Italy this is not considered a crime. In other countries like the US and GB, people who infringe these rights can be sue for plagiarism and, if students, they can be expelled from school. It is really strange that a creative and inventive country like Italy, which in the past held the world record in patents, now seems to care so little about plagiarism..maybe it depends on our way of thinking, on education, but I’m not sure. I need to think more about it, feel this will prove to be an interesting issue!
Anyway, I think that sometimes a little “help” is good for everyone, but it has to be just a little sprinkling, not an entire source of ideas! One good alternative to property rights is to offer the work under a creative common license, as well explained in this webpage. Under a creative common license creators can directly choose which rights they reserve and which they waive, thus allowing people to use their work and share it as a public domain. That's very nice and , most importantly, it is absolutely free! I do love the way the CC changed the motto "all rights reserved" with "some rights reserved"; I believe it helped to develop a higher sense of responsibility and philanthropy.
Well, I think that's all for now
Talk to you soon, just need to gather my thoughts!
Anna
