Intellectual+Property

= Intellectual Property =

By Alessio Spiga
From the ITGS guide: //**Intellectual Property (IP)**// includes ideas,discoveries,writings,works of art,software,collections and presentations of data. Copyright, trademarks and patents exist to protect intellectual property. However, the easy and accurate duplication methods made available through IT can undermine such protection ;//for instance such file sharing sites such as **Pirate Bay** that allows users to download torrents for music and film files for free has ultimately resulted in a loss of profit from music and film organisations that have the rights over their product.//

The basic idea of intellectual property rights (copyrights and patents) was instituted to induce authors, artists, etc. to keep producing material to benefit society as a whole.

One advantage of this was that the author had exclusive rights to his creation for a certain period of time so only he could distribute his work and profit from it.

Another advantage to this was authors were more inclined to produce more works if they got exclusive compensation from them; so the public benefited by having more material available.

After the expiry of the copyright, the work reverted to the public domain and anyone could use it as they pleased. This expiry was supposed to encourage the creators to make more, new works instead of relying on what they had already produced.

Unfortunately, today, these concepts have been somewhat eroded in favour of the larger entertainment business that work together -copyrights have been extended for overly long periods (which doesn't in fact encourage creators to produce new material, but rather allows them to subsist on the old). And (up to now) the copyright laws have not evolved to meet new technologies.

As for disadvantages? As it stands today, the public is not receiving much in the way of expired copyrighted material to add to the public domain. And the copyrights are overly restrictive in many aspects.

the competetive advantage of **//IP://** intellectual property consists of physical manifestation of original thought in compliance with statutes, specifically patent, copyright, or trademark statues. Also, for the purposes of this paper, infringement of intellectual property rights consists of the following:

(1) patent infringement - piracy: the unauthorized reproduction, use, or imitation of an invention, creation, or product with the objective of having the result pass as genuine;

(2) copyright infringement - the definition of which strains the statutory fabric by which copyright is codified as discussed later;

(3) product counterfeiting - branding goods with a mark identical to, or substantially indistinguishable from, a legally registered trademark where those goods are similar or identical to the product for which the trademark is registered (definition used in the proposed General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade International Anticounterfeiting Code);

(4) the unauthorized use of a trademark on a substantially nonsimilar product;

(5) "passing off" - the use of a similar, but not identical, trademark on a substantially similar product, or the use of similar or identical packaging without the trademark, and

(6) "gray market" or parallel sales - the sale of products bearing an authorized trademark in contravention of a marketing agreement (such as exportation and reimportation: purchasing goods from a domestic manufacturer, allegedly for overseas destinations, then returning them and selling them at lower cost in the domestic market).

Many industries can substantially profit from //**IP**// however some industries have seen a recent decline in revenues due to breaches of copyright and trademark laws through piracy. Most torrent sites including //'Pirate Bay' ,'Limewire" etc.// have many legal suits against them and many governments control and monitor peoples involvement on these sites as they are allowing succesfull free downloads easily accessible to the public illegally. //'Pirate Bay'// credits itself as //"the worlds most resilliant bitttorrent site"// due to the fact that governments have yet been able to shut the website from the world of internet. //**__Negative Effects on the Music industry__**// Each year, //the industry loses about $4.2 billion to piracy worldwide//
 * //Music pirates are the first to lose// because the recording industry and law enforcement officials are cracking down around the world. Do the crime and you will pay the fine or do the time.
 * //Consumers also lose// because the shortcut savings enjoyed by downloding music drive up the costs of legitimate product for everyone
 * //Honest retailers (who back up the products they sell) lose// because they can’t compete with the prices offered by illegal vendors, or free illegal downloads. Less business means fewer jobs, jobs often filled by young adults.
 * //Record companies lose.// Eighty-five percent of recordings released don’t even generate enough revenue to cover their costs. Record companies depend heavily on the profitable fifteen percent of recordings to subsidize the less profitable types of music, to cover the costs of developing new artists, and to keep their businesses operational. The thieves and downloaders often don’t focus on the eighty-five percent; they go straight to the top and steal the gold.
 * Finally, and perhaps most importantly, //the creative artists lose.// Musicians, singers, songwriters and producers don’t get the royalties and fees they’ve earned. Virtually all artists (95%) depend on these fees to make a living. The artists also depend on their reputations, which are damaged by the inferior quality of pirated copies sold to the public (when transferring files from a CD to an MP3 or similar format, quality is lost).

related article: reference to //'Pirate Bay'// and the story behind it :[]

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