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Series on Intellectual Property Controversies
It might not have been how I originally wanted to spend my Saturday night, but then again if I hadn’t of gone it would have been extremely difficult to write this paper. I attended Molly Kleinman’s lecture about copyright and how it’s linked to libraries.
So there I was with my pen and note book ready to take notes for later use. She first started out just talking about the purpose of copyright. From there she gave two different points of views on copyright, first was what it means according to the constitution and then according to some big companies. Not surprisingly there was a huge difference in each definition. The Constitution states that the purpose was to promote the progress of science and useful arts. The definition according to big companies is one that I am more familiar with, or would be more like how I would define it. They state that it is to give media companies’ total control over content, forever and always. However, she came to a point in her lecture where she explained where copyright comes from, apparently it just happens. You used to need to have the symbol, © and then register your work with the copyright office, but now you don’t. Now it exists from the moment that it’s created and last for the whole life of the originator plus 70 years after death. This ties into what we talked about in class, about whether anything is actually copyrighted. Someone brought up the point that truthfully anything that you write done in a book has to of came from an idea that you got from something else. That could be your whole storyline about the guy and girl that fell in love. The point ...