Blog 4 - Intellectual Property

With the evolution of the internet today, we can now share information faster and more efficiently than ever. With this huge boom of the sharing of knowledge, it began to become apparent that too much sharing of knowledge could be a bad thing. If someone were to get ahold of some information that if harmful to someone else, or even worse, a governmental institution, that knowledge could be used to actually harm that individual, or even a group of people. This is where the ideas of Intellectual Property and the IPL (Intellectual Property Law) come in; their purposes are to define what is classified as Intellectual property, and defines the legal limits of what can or can not be shared, and who with, respectively. However, the fear of the wrong people getting ahold of information that can harm individuals overshadowed many of the positives that the capability of sharing knowledge can possess. We can take the case of the United States vs Swartz as a primary example. The 26 year old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “…reportedly broke into a computer-wiring closet at the campus to access the university network and downloaded thousands of files from JSTOR—an online database of scholarly articles and journals” (http://www.chronicle.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/blogs/wiredcampus/programmer-is-charged-with-hacking-into-journal-database/32316). He was an active internet activist, and all of the files and programs he stole and attempted to share contained no harmful information to anyone; they were all educational, academic sources. Although he was breaking the law by stealing information, he had no bad intentions in mind. He believed that the sharing of knowledge should be accessible by everyone with a computer, not just those who attend a university or pay a monthly fee to a database sight. That is why if I ruled the internet, I would greatly change these laws surrounding Intellectual Property. I see no reason as to why the collective knowledge of all people all around the world should be held back. I would implement laws that any academic source or journal can be freely shared across the internet for all users to be able to access, but keep restrictions on information that could be harmful to others. Obviously the problem with this solution is that the publishers of these sources of information would lose their revenue; therefore, I would explore different implementations of fees that would be required to be paid to access this information, that would go directly to the publishers of the information.