May
13
Copyright
May 13, 2018 | Leave a Comment
Crowdsourcing is the idea that you get a better result from a large population than with just two experts. Ideas are improved and are better when ideas are freely expressed. I believe that ideas can be greatly improved. However, how can we truly fact check the ideas. Real time editing and contribution of ideas makes it hard to discern the truth from the lies. Think about how tweets are retweeted and shared and discussed at the tap of a button. Yet, we don’t do enough digging to see how credible the source is or who controls the information. Then the information is shared people become misinformed and then riots start and organizations create rallies of false information. Crowdsourcing has its benefits but then it also has some consequences.
John Locke says you acquire ownership when you mix you labor with the earth. If you have a lot of land and you’re not doing anything with it and someone does something it, do they acquire ownership by mixing their labor with the earth? What’s your moral claim to ownership? It seems that Locke is making the claim that once one invests time to labor on a specific piece of “land” then the ownership belongs to them. Yet, that logic can be met with so many objections. If his reasoning holds up then employees of Goldman Sachs and Northrop Grumman who bring their intellect to labor on the “land” then hold more ownership in those companies than what is given to them. Essentially the employees own more than the CEO and the COO. They don’t labor the land like everyone else, does they negotiate it. They are mixing their labor but fair use and rights then are tricky because the amount of labor is not equal to everyone. We aren’t exactly a moral society and people don’t even get fair access to stocks or benefits given by these companies.
Copyright should not be extended. If copyright is constantly extended, it prevents the general public from having full access to the older works and, therefore, thriving and substantially impacting society as a whole. Similar to learning from previous mistakes in history, having access to the older works allows the public to study them and possibly create better works that surpass the older works that currently exists and mold them into something that benefits the current structure of society as it exists today.
So imagine I build a house, and then I die and the house is sold to you. Should there be a limit on how long you could own it, after which it would be in the public domain? There shouldn’t be a limit because intellectual property differs from physical property. Intellectual property has the chance to impact society to a more significant degree than physical property could. Intellectual property is intangible, an idea that is conceived in the mind. Despite the fact that ideas can be reduced to a “physical state” and thus become subjected to copyright laws, the original concepts are still intellectual. In contrast, physical property just exists. Physical property can be discovered or acted upon in order to obtain ownership, but you don’t have to conceive of physical property unlike with intellectual property. Owning the physical property does not automatically entitle the person to ownership of all of the intellectual property rights. When the house is sold, the person is receiving ownership of the physical property (the house). That still potentially leaves the intellectual property of the house to be negotiated for.
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