This past week in class we talked about Intellectual Property Rights. Meaning copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. These four have an abundant amount of information attached to them, so I've found a few things that I found humorous about copyright. To start off here is a comic strip I found on the-digital-reader website depicting the many lawsuits that come from copyright.
This comic strip isn't entirely off base either, many lawsuits do arise when copyright comes into question. This very issue was the essence of the Top 10 Copyright Crimes list that comes from a LawMeme website out of Yale Law School. This list includes many ideas about the average person and the television industry, it's quite comical and may end up being true. With limits on when you can turn the channel as an advertisement comes on or channel surfing in general.
When you search for Copyright Humor on Google.com you can find many humorous parodies about copyright law and the system in general including a dispute with the copyright holders of "The Other White Meat" and ThinkGeek.com as the latter used the former's catch phrase in an advertisement for Unicorn Meat. It seems to me that lawsuits over the use of catch phrases in an advertisement for a fictional animals' meat is unnecessary. However, for the copyright holder of the phrase it means everything. I guess the value is in the eye of the beholder...or should I say the copyright holder?!
The fight against or the fight for information about copyright has been turned into an initiative for QuestionCopyright.org. This website was created in 2007 with the intent to "provide advocacy and practical education to help cultural producers embrace open distribution." There are many articles discussing the issues with copyright and the problems that the industry faces with the use of copyright. In fact one of the contributors to QCO made a video called "Copying is Not Theft" that raises some unique questions about whether copyright limits the industry or whether copying really takes anything away from the creative industry at all. I'll leave it up to you, should copyright laws be made more relaxed or should they become even more stringent to protect our intellectual property from being stolen and used against our will?
Links in order of use:
This is an important topic and will only increase in importance. Perhaps at some point the cost of defending ideas will be too high relative to more choice in the market.
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