Emerging Technologies in STC

When contemplating intellectual property and the use of creative works a very blurry line appears in the sand. When is material too protected by copyrights and when is there not enough protection for the creator? Bound By Law pointed out that now all creative material is automatically copyrighted and it is the responsibility of the user to track down the original copyright owner to obtain permission (9). By this point in time nearly everyone has heard that the song "Happy Birthday" is held under copyright. In fact, the documentary entitled "The Corporation" refused to play audio to accompany a video of a birthday party because they did not want to pay the fee to play the song in their film. Is this an example of too much protection?

On the other hand, Wikinomics provided an example of a harmonious balance between not enough and too much. IBM was a case example that Tapscott and Williams examined. When IBM's sales began to decline while trying to complete with other platforms such as Microsoft, they looked to open source communities, more specifically Linux to salvage their company. Although entering the world of open source development slowly they soon learned to respect the rules of the community in order to participate and gain from it. In March of 1998, IBM joined the Apache programming community and opened up large portions of valuable code to the community in exchange for participation. In December of 1998, IBM began moving from Apache to Linux and has not looked back since (Wikinomics, 77-83). Although it was a daring business move IBM saw the value in sharing their code in exchange for developments that would save the company millions.

The two examples above are great for understanding the need for open source sharing but do little to actually answer why intellectual property protection even matters. So why does it? It is a very hard question to answer and I'm not sure I will be able to answer it but one quote from Wikinomics really brought this question into perspective for me. "If you do not stay current with the users, they invent around you, creating opportunities for competitors" (94). Although this quote originally was in relation to Firefox, the web browser, I think it applies to all intellectual property. I think finding a balance between too much protection and not enough is difficult but very important. If you design a website all about the economy but do not allow any input from users the material quickly becomes outdated and the users move on to a site such as Wikipedia where then can participate and mold the page as time progresses. No one benefits from a solid medium but if you can design something that is fluid and can be molded and adapted as it is needed it becomes far more valuable. Protecting intellectual property is important for profit and recognition reasons but it is far more important to share portions of the property in order to share creativity and evolve as a community, whether is be web designers or musicians.

So how does all of this help us decide what sort of licensing we should use for our wiki work? I think it all goes back to are discussion of what are goals are for the page and what we define as success. We wanted a site that was easy to use, provided all necessary information, etc. and I think the only way to achieve this is to let the users define these standards on their own. Even with a class of 14 as we have we still need outside input. I think the ideas presented in the Creative Commons video are exactly what we need. We do want to protect a portion of our work but we also want to allow it to grow as more information becomes available. I think we should have a discussion as a group about what we want to keep solid and what is fluid for recreation by the users. Like the video says " When you share your creativity, you are enabling people anywhere to use it, learn from it, and be inspired by it." It is very possible that the material and design of our wiki will inspire somewhere to share their own story regarding the bridge, let's be the platform for them to build it.