This post is not related to any democratic issue. It’s debate of some different sort of freedom, different class of rights, different kind of thoughts.. where there is nothing exactly right or exactly wrong. Perhaps some issues often ignored, often uncared, often overlooked.
So here it goes.
What all rights do you have on this lovely planet? You can play, you can dance, you can read, you can write, you can travel every continent, and you can touch the sky! You are very lucky, aren’t you?
What all rights you don’t have? Yeah, there are some negative rights too. Let me touch upon those in this blog.
Released is latest version of windows, best sound tracks of some cool music, and breathless stunts of Rajinikanth. All you need to do is click, click, click and enjoy for nothing. Downloading music illegally from internet and playing in latest gadgets.
Perhaps law says - downloading any material illegally is considered infringement and may lead to min 3 years of Jail and fine as high as 50K INR.
How many songs of your computer or music players are actually purchased by you? Perhaps none! Then, aren’t you a law breaking citizen. How many movies you have in your gigabytes hard disk? How many did you purchase Sir? How many software’s did you actually purchased in life.
There are some awesome people in this world. Those are crazy ones. They create stuff for human community. Say music, movies, books, operating system, softwares etc. These stuff really makes life easy and comfortable. Books educate us, music refreshes us, movies entertain us, and operating systems adds so nice an experience. Nothing is for free and but we are salaryless (Full employment ~ No Salary) students. Shouldn’t we enjoy freedom to learn and enjoy the huge present quantum of knowledge and experience without any constraints?
But, there are some copyright laws, design rights, trademark stuff and patent power that do exists in present law system. They talk of whole bundle of laws (Economic rights, Reproduction and distribution, Adaption, Communication to public, Abridgement, Commercial rental, Translations, Moral rights).These rights are a headache for most of us. They mean – listen only music you purchase, use softwares you pay for, only books you have bought. If this is the case, all our learning will be locked.
On one side these laws protect interests of actual author and on other side they lock our present knowledge. Whether to protect interest of Public or of Publishers, creativity or economic interest. Law vs Justice ! (Law may make wrong assumptions.)
You copy-paste and prepare your project report. You use best of your creativity to merge many articles and prepare your master piece, incredibly impressive report. You break rules and party all the night.
Law allows us to use only that e-material you pay for. You have to pay and use the book. People in India are poor. If you don’t have money, then please don’t read and write – there are many illiterates in India, you will only add one more to that number. If you are not rich, you don’t have freedom to learn. Isn’t this a stop to learning ability of people? Would there be possibly any Newton and Einstein, if we had locked all then knowledge under some copyrights and patent rules. Knowledge should be transparent and available to all without any constraints. Without music, I can’t even think of a day.
Wait, but what if you are producer of some cool movie. You spend million bucks and don’t get even a penny in return. You spend your half a dozen years writing some fantastic book and don’t even get half a dozen dollars. You code up entire operating system only to see happy faces of crackers and hackers. You compose some awesome song only to become a beggar. Shouldn’t you feel these poor guys need to have special rights to protect their intellectual work? So come’s the existence of these so called copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade dress etc.
Well I wonder, I really wonder about existence of these laws. I used to believe this planet is superbly awesome place, where I enjoy all freedoms. Anyway, I am not an expert to comment any further on this topic. But really this field is some outcome of conflicting ideas!
Across the globe there are many cultures and so are different laws.
India - We hear of so many pending cases in India courts and amount of time it takes to solve some issue. But Law here are weak, rather that helps so large a population to excess intellectual freedom without much constraints. Our law allows us to use intellectual stuff for educational purpose with the motto of fair dealing. You can play any song in your marriage without any permission from artist. You can screen any movie inside your educational institute with some motto of education; you don’t need any special permission from producer of movie. That’s beauty of Indian Law.
Rest of World: Things are quite different elsewhere. Remember, if you land up in US, you can’t play any music in your marriage without artist’s permission. You don’t enjoy much freedom. You need to quote any sentence you copy from any document. Rules are strict, yeah indeed they are strict.
These concepts of negative rights are quite flexible and also dangerous. You can’t assume anything if you land up in some unknown country. Different cultures give different interpretations. Some countries are very sensitive in connection with copyrights, others may not be.
Abhi ke liye itna hi …. Hope I get some tym to add more to this !
Thanks for reading.
If you have come so far ..why not drop your views about Intellectual Property rights here.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are strictly personal. No representation is made that it is timely, accurate or complete.
