Intellectual Property Rights

"What is your opinion about intellectual property rights as it pertains to software and digital media?", is the question that was asked of me today in my Information Infrastructure class.

As I hear ongoing news of  SOPA and experienced first hand the blackout of Wikipedia a few weeks ago, I figured that this was a relevant topic to be discussed in class. As a whole, I believe that piracy of "intellectual property" is wrong. With great ideas and inventions, I believe that it is of astronomical concern that the government continue to issue and enforce copyrights, trademarks, and patents. I am a firm believer that if an individual or a company creates a product, that their product should be safeguarded and guaranteed certain safeties from theft. With all criminal areas, there are certain gray areas. These gray areas are hard to define, especially with the day to day changes in technology. If I were to sneak a camera into a movie theater, that without a doubt would be a direct violation of non-gray laws. Anyone caught sneaking a camera into a movie or illegally bootlegging media of any form should fined the maximum amount and serve the full sentence of allowable jail time. 

Sadly, with the stiffening of digital rights management, owning intellectual property you thought your purchased is no longer true. With DVD copy protection, Content Scramble System, and Advanced Access Content System an individual never really owns what they bought. I believe that if I purchase a song on Apple's iTunes that I shouldn't have to worry about FairPlay technology convert my music into protected AAC formatted files. I should not be limited by the number of devices that I can listen to my music on, nor have to go through complicated steps to convert my music so that I can listen to it on other devices. 

Fair use has been thrown out of the window along with my rights as a purchaser. I found an video entitled YouTube Copyright School which is fairly humorous and explains some of the more absurd copyright rules that are enforced on YouTube.