Ethics of Intellectual Property and Copyright

What is Copyright? Copyright is the right to the total control over something created by one, it awards the rights of total control to the creator, the person with the control of the copyright on a product has the choice for allowing recreation of the product and alternations to the products elements. Copyright just states that adaptation, copying and distribution remains in total control of the author/creator.
There are three moral rights protected by the Copyright Act, they are as follows:

• The right to attribution

This is the to be identified as the creator of the work and product the creator has produced, where any of the authors work is to be distributed and used for another persons gain, it is the law that the author must be recognized under the copyright act.

• The right of integrity

The right to show that any of the work produced is not to be under alternations or editing of elements, for the work likely to be passed off as someone else's work. Artists and musicians may allow segments of their works to be shown by others but the full works of a product produced is far more sensitive.

• The right to no false attribution

This means that one or a company does not have the right to produce something/product and falsely attribute the authoring of the product to another person or author, this is due to the fact that this could result in the discrediting of an author with work that would not be to there standard or style. Not only that, the author the work would be being falsely accredited may not feel it fair for the work to be accredited to them.

So how might it affect those in the interactive media industry?

This creates fairness and equality within the media industry, stopping companies or persons from being abused, extorted or illegally falsely identified. The end result is that without consent of the author or creator no product/products maybe used or represented with possibility of financial gain.

Is Illegal Downloading Morally Right or Wrong?


There is much controversy over whether or not the illegal downloading everybody participates in is morally wrong, though I am one of those participating in these acts of piracy I do not deem it morally right. If I am acting under the knowledge that the producer or author I am effectively stealing from is under financial pressure or to a disadvantage due to my downloading, then I feel a sense of guilt and tend not to opt for downloading. This is a rarity though for most the products we see and all the products we download are already at a huge financial status. It is morally wrong but in my mind exceptions can be made for the leaking of government documents and information the public should not be kept from.

Creative Commons


The idea behind Creative Commons or CC is to bring education and acknowledgement to a higher level using the vast open space of the internet. CC supports the uses of different materials on the internet that are already under copyright law so that others can use the materials for the development of their knowledge.

The picture to the left is a print screen capture of Google searches usage rights relating to Creative Commons, the advanced search allows me to search for materials that come under "CC" rights. click the picture to see a full size.

I sourced from Google search under Creative Commons filter for "Bose" the headphone/speaker company, I tried to search for an image. But in when i made an attempt to copy the image in order to represent it in this blog post I was redirected to this CC licence page. see below:
Deed/Licence 2.0 right to attribution

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

What could total non-existence of copyright result in?


If the world had no copyright laws or rights then it is quite likely that we would be living in a far more corrupt society than it is now, though some of the rich and wealthy may not be rich some of them could be result in being even more rich and abusing the freedom far more. The world in the media would have to rely on every-bodies trust for the working of anarchy and trust in every-bodies moral views, unfortunately we know that this is simply impossible when we see the corruption today. Though it would be very interesting for the subject to be experimented with, it should be tried and tested is what I believe.

Please feel free to express your views on any of the views acknowledged in this blog post!