Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Intellectual Property
My definition of intellectual property is the ownership of a person's own ideas. After searching the term on Google I came across a good expert definition on The United States Patent and Trademark Office's website. They defined intellectual property as imagination made real. It is ownership of dream, idea, an improvement, an emotion that we can touch, see, hear, or feel. It is an asset just like your home, your car, or your bank account. There are multiple examples of this in academic and everyday life. In everyday life a person may come up with a funny joke then a few days later their friend uses the same joke. A person may find themselves claiming the joke is theirs after their friend uses it. In academic life a person may create a hypothesis about something, they then can create an experiment to test it. This whole process is their academic property because they came up with the idea and tested it. When intellectual property is shared or manipulated I think that it becomes less personal. The person who originally came up with the idea can feel less ownership of it, especially when they are not given credit.
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Hi Shana,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post on intellectual property. Remember that an idea becomes intellectual property when someone creates a tangible, material product using that idea. For example, if a friend tells an original joke for the first time, and is the first one to write it, record it, illustrate it, and/or videotape it, that friend's joke now becomes his or her intellectual property. It is possible that someone can tell a new version of that joke, or deliver the joke in a different medium...but that person will have to give credit to the originator.
It's a tough job, simply because humans have had a long history of NOT doing it. People did not realize that stories, jokes, and songs could actually belong to someone until relatively recently. So there are many nursery rhymes and types of folklore that we learn as children, and never find out who actually wrote those things down (if they even did).
Sincerely,
Professor Wexelbaum