Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University Intellectual Property Discussion

PART 1- discussion post 300 words about:

Since its beginning, the evolving concept of intellectual property, especially that of copyright, has been driven by technological advances. Discuss some examples of copyright law being driven by technology.   How do you see that continuing? with TWO REFERENCES 

PART 2 – write 3 replies to student's on their discussion posts 75-100 words

This is the first student's discussion:

Introduction

Modern world invention and innovation, commonly known as the civilization that has existed since 600BCE that is experienced in the current world have been greatly enhanced by the concept of intellectual property. The concept of intellectual property goes hand in hand with technology. Intellectual copyrights works and concepts involve several techniques. Such techniques include artistic, musical, dramatic, film production techniques, and literary works involving poems and articles. The concept of intellectual property involves mind creations and creativity. Furthermore, intellectual property tends to protect and give support to the talented, and the situation has led to its success since the 15th century. It provides support through various laws that are being driven by technology.

One law of intellectual property that has contributed to its success is the Copyright's Designs and the Patent act of 1988. This law protects the original owner's interest in an article of creative works such that the original owner has the right to share or not to share their artistic works with third parties and takes complete control. Therefore, original owners of the work are not to be subjected to forceful agreement by any other company (Moorkens & Lewis, 2019). Copyright gives the owner the right of being attributed as the owner of the article during publication, the right to ensure the work is not attributed falsely, and the right to privacy of their films. It also provides moral rights of the owner upon publication of the work.

Furthermore, based on this Copyright's law and CPDA of 1988, the unpublished work of a dead person shall remain unpublished and under protection until 2039. It is when the decision will be made whether to publish the work or not. Copyright also provides the performer's right to be consulted before the work is published (Ginsburg, 2018). However, exceptions are made by Copyright that entirely rely on fair dealings, such as non-commercial research and private study, which gives people the authority to copy the work for personal study before it is published.

Conclusion

Copyright's concept of Intellectual property has brought significant advantages to the owners of artistic works. It protects artistic owners and gives them the right to control their works and their distribution. Also, Copyright gives value and honor to the author by attribute.

References

Ginsburg, J. C. (2018). People, not machines: authorship and what it means in the Berne Convention.

Moorkens, J., & Lewis, D. (2019). Copyright and the Reuse of Translation as Data.

This is the second student's discussion:

The current intellectual property system is fit for many purposes, but there are areas in which it needs to adapt. For example, artificial intelligence and the life sciences are two major areas of technological and scientific development that will raise important challenges for copyright law. Many of the issues we face are multi-dimensional in nature, and together they pose a huge governance challenge. Also, as big data gains traction and we move toward the Internet of Things, huge amounts of data are being generated. Much of it falls outside the traditional categories of copyright law. We also see that major online platforms like Facebook and YouTube are creating vast quantities of valuable data from users’ activities. There are, however, many complex questions coming to the fore about the ownership of those data. (Gurry)

In the foreseeable future, it seems to us that the emergence of new technologies will continue to have a radical impact on the existing intellectual property landscape and test the premises and practices of the intellectual property system. Even though we do not understand the full scale and dimensions of this impact, we can expect major challenges for intellectual property administration, policy and governance. We can also foresee significant development challenges arising from the huge differences in technological capacity that exist across the world; we simply just need to try to understand how emerging technologies will impact the existing intellectual property system and its future evolution. (Gurry)

Different countries vary in the extent to which they protect intellectual property and enforce intellectual property regulations. China and Thailand are the two major centers of counterfeiting and for their lack of respect for intellectual property. Indonesia is also another hotbed of IP infringement. It does not have much of the necessary infringement protection machinery in place. The Basic Law of Hong Kong separates the IP systems of China and HK. There is an absence of mutual IP protection between the two regions and intellectual property rights registered in HK will not necessarily receive protection on the mainland. (Reid)

Works Cited:

Gurry, Francis. “Francis Gurry on the future of intellectual property: opportunities and challenges.” World Intellectual Property Organization. 2017. https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2017/05/arti…

Reidd, David Mchardy. “Intellectual Property Rights: A Comparative perspective on Asia, the EU and North America.” SCIELO. 2012. http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_art…

this is the 3rd student you have to reply on them:

Copyright is an old term, aiming at protecting the author/creator's right on their own intellectual products. However, at the aicient times, copyright is easy to protect. For instance, the author of a book, can sign up the contract with a publisher, making this publisher the only legal source of the book. If other publisher tried to sell that book, then it might be sued. In that case, no publisher would like to make illegal copies because it's too easy to be spotted and the cost would be high. Nowadays, another type of copyright has been brought to the public sight and it turned out to be hard to control. It's the software copyright.

Software companies which make software products, like development tools, offline games, and such sorts, they face severe pirate issues. At first, they sell their product by DVD or on their official websites, with little protection in the software itself, they soon found that illegal copies are everywhere. Then they might inroduce some technique like CD-Keys and registration, the idea is the software will check the users' license everytime the user logs in. But, this technique could be easily bypassed. For instance, if I want to use the Navicat Premium or Adobe Premiere for free, notice that those softwares would definately charge the users for their services, I can just go to baidu (or google) and type in "How to CRACK the XXX", and there is answer. The cracked software, cracking procedure, are just there for user to take. In addition, I have never heard of any company sue those crackers, they never know which genius cracked their software, whoever they can get is merely a distributor. So we can see, protecting copyrights in cyberspace is difficult.

There are also many articles talking about how to solve this problem, by both technical solutions and law implementations[1]. Come to think of it, the companies could still manage to do something more to protect their properities from illegal crackings, like they can force the platform to ban the content of such copyright violation, the law would make sure the platform and even user obey. But they didn't do that. Why? Despite the effort of negotiating with so many online websites, I think another reason is the software company is allowing such pirate to exist. Although it could bring lost to the companies, but having those users crack their services is better than losting all of them. Those users could still be used to collect more feedback, getting the product more famous than the competitor and so on, there are still greater benifits for companies to allow pirating to happen. And there will be users who experience the "free version" at first and they are then happy with paying for the service. As conclusion, the software companies are just doing a trade-off between their copyrights and popularity.

References:

[1].Yan Li,Lengxuan Zhang.Research on the Legal Responsibility of End User Using Cracked Software[J].Journal of Harbin Vocational & Technical College, 2020(02):93-96.