I don’t think I have gotten my head to stop spinning after doing all of the readings for this week. Apparently, copyrights and intellectual property debates are not my thing. Not that I don’t necessarily understand them, but moreover, I just don’t have a good idea of what to do about them. It seems like at some point in all four of the readings, the authors made a point, and then in the next paragraph went, “However… the exact opposite of my point can be argued as well.”
The article I enjoyed the most was Brown’s “Who Owns Native Culture?” Perhaps the reason for this is that I used to live in Australia and found the subject matter interesting (more than I can say for the scientific debate over poly B). But also, one thing really stuck out to me in the article: Bulun’s work was taken and distributed without his consent- that much was agreed upon. One of Bulun’s arguments against why this was so awful, was because the images were sacred and “has the inside secret meaning of our ceremony, law, and custom… To produce it without strict observance of the law… interferes with the relationship between [the painter], [his] ancestors, and the creator being.” Then, as the article states- why can the image be reproduced in the book? It seems as though issues of culture, or religion, are especially touchy when it comes to copyright. This idea, combined with the ideas that other articles bring up about authorship, lead me to wonder… do ideas of intellectual property hold true for the Bible? It seems that most issues of ownership of intellectual property only become an issue when there is some monetary profit being made. Who gets the money for the publications of the Bible? Who allows t-shirt companies to make shirts with biblical phrases on them? Does “anyone” actually own the rights to these ideas? But then again, as stated in Brown’s article, “you can’t copyright an idea, you can only copyright the expression of an idea.” But… is there a person, or group, that takes “credit” for the Bible? (Disclaimer: I would not consider myself a religious person, so maybe there is a clear cut answer to this question that I don’t really know… feel free to fill me in.)
The issue in McSherry’s article, “Telling Tales Out of School” seemed to be a huge headache to me. Quite frankly, I am glad I was not the judge who had to shift through and decide that case. Even though I found it overwhelming at times, I still found the dilemma interesting. Science does seem to be very secretive, and this case brings up interesting points of secrecy and research. My profession, teaching, is the exact opposite. We go to huge lengths to share everything! However, once again, I think some of the secrecy boils down to two simple things: money and prestige. Pelletier’s entire argument revolved around these two things. But then I started to think… I have a friend who is a teacher in Colorado. Her school district moved to merit based pay; that is, teachers get paid on a scale according to how well their students perform. I think the district thought that this would create incentive for teachers to work hard, and be held accountable for their teaching. (Disclaimer: I think there is nothing wrong with having teachers being held accountable for their teaching- in fact, I think it is a great thing. But not in this way, and I will tell you why in my next point.) However, it seems that this year, the plan is back firing. Instead of sharing curricular ideas, and helping each other problem solve around students and issues, teachers at her school are becoming very secretive and not sharing their work. They have adopted the mentality: if I found something that works and helping students perform better, then why would I share it with other teachers so their students excel too? Oh boy. Doesn’t that seem like the anti-logic of school? Anyway, that was a small digression, but I couldn’t help thinking about it as I was reading about the issues of propertization of scientific data in this article.
Litman’s article, “Revising the Copyright Law for the Informative Age,” seemed to focus once again on the gains for entrepreneurs. Yet, while reading this article, I did feel that entrepreneurs were getting a little bit of the short end of the stick. Digital information has changed the way our country operates. We can get information, basically, whenever we want to. But who owns all of that information? I remember learning in high school English classes, that once an idea is deemed “common knowledge” we didn’t need to cite it in our papers. Thinking back on this, at what point does something become “common knowledge”? This links back to the previous article and the scientific discoveries too. We know how that the sky is blue, but do we credit someone with that idea? And what about mathematical theorems? My high school math classes are failing me right now, but I know there are theorems with mathematicians names on them (Euclid perhaps?)… they are acceptable as “common knowledge” but still have their discoverer’s name attached to them. Interesting… very interesting. Okay, let’s get back to digital information and copyrights. As Litman states in this article, “works can be altered, undectably, and there is no way for an author to insure that the work being distributed over her name is the version she wrote.” So ideas could potentially be changed, and changed, and changed again without the author having any idea. This is almost the reverse of issues of the science article; what if the author’s words get twisted into something they don’t want them to say? That would be a law suit of another beast. Copyright…apparently it’s a tricky thing.
The last of the four articles I read was Boyle’s “Intellectual Property and the Liberal State.” However, I wish I would have read this one first. (I print all of them off in order from the syllabus, which then puts the first article at the bottom of the pile. Next time, I think I will try to read them in the order they are listed… might be some sense to the order they were recorded.) This article was a good general umbrella for topics within the other signed articles. Again, slight head spinning due to wordy sentences and ideas that had no clear answer, but enjoyable to read. Two different quotations stuck out to me in this reading:
· “How can we be free and yet secure from other people’s freedoms, secure yet free to do what we want?” Basically, how can we all do what we want to do, but also be secure in knowing that other people won’t hurt us. Just food for thought.
· “Once expressed, it is impossible for [an idea] to remain the author’s property.” This quote really helped me to conceptualize the debate amongst intellectual property. It reminded me of a quote my French teacher gave me when I graduated high school “If you have an object and you trade it, you only have one object. If you have an idea, and you trade it, now you have two ideas.” (Of course, the quote was given to me in French and took me entirely too long to figure out.) Once you read something, it is yours to remember. So, at what point, if ever, can an author loose credit for their works? Back to that old debate of “property” I guess. And it sends my head spinning, and spinning once again.
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