IP Awareness

The electronic world is one of the main reasons that intellectual property is such a hot topic these days. There are good and bad sides to having so much information available to anyone on the internet. With everything so accessible most users don't think about what they're taking. As a designer I'm more aware of IP and what I'm able to use but I think that's mainly because I'm a designer. People are familiar with plagiarism from books and papers but there isn't that same understanding with other materials. People need to be better educated on the topic of IP because they could be stealing from other people or people could be taking from them.

I think one example of users not being aware about their intellectual property is when Facebook's Statement of Rights came into the spot light not too long ago. Once you post your IP on Facebook, they have the rights to do whatever they want with it. Facebook is protecting their own IP by taking your's. If anything you post is reused you can't do a single thing about it because technically it's now owned by Facebook. Some people don't agree with this because they think it should be their own property. They've posted it, it's on their page and they control it. But they're posting to Facebook's network so they're giving up rights. This is what the internet is doing to us now that so much information is available. Facebook is such a large company that obviously they have lawyers to write them an iron clad statement of rights which the average user can't compete against. Once you're a Facebook user you are subject to their rights. Bottom line, you have to be careful what you post on Facebook, and for that matter, the rest of the internet.

I hope that Facebook's brief headlines made people more aware of their intellectual property rights and users will be better educated. The internet is an easy place to take someones property and you always have to be careful of what you're using and how you're using it. A lot of the time it's as easy as asking the user for permission, but with cases like Facebook there are lawyers involved and it's a little harder then just asking.