Emerging Technologies in STC

I found this weeks readings from Wikinomics and Bound By Law to be particularly interesting. During an age of peer production popularity, it makes determining the rights of intellectual property very difficult. It used to be that works were not protected unless the author included a copyright notice. The law has now changed and all creative works are automatically copyrighted. According to "Bound By Law", "If there's no copyright notice, it's up to you to track the rights down." This can obviously be extremely frustrating and time consuming for the author/artist. This is why I feel that Attribution (by) licensing is the type we should use. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution (Creative Commons Licensing Types). So far I have had luck with knowing who to credit from the material I have obtained.

A quote that I found to be very important was that from Bound By Law, Judge Kozinski said "Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture." The judge explains: "Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: culture, like science and technology grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before." While I feel that it is important for those to be recognized for their work, it is hard to ignore that mass collaboration from that of peer production can be extremely successful.

A perfect example of peer production is the creation of Wikipedia which is a free online encyclopedia that can be written and edited by anyone. The 2005 explosions in London Underground stations was an event that was largely documented by wiki enthusiasts. "By the end of the day, over twenty-five hundred users had created a comprehensive fourteen-page account of the event that was much more detailed than the information provided by any single news outlet." (Wikinomics, pg. 65). This is also what we are essentially creating as a class by collecting data and information from a numerous sources for our web site. By collaborating all of our knowledge and expertise about the bridge collapse we are able to provide a creative and informational site to our audience.

Peer production has proven to be successful, but it is important to keep in mind that there are some obstacles that we must overcome. It is essential that our site is consistent in all aspects. We want to keep our audience interested and prevent and confusion. It is also very important for our information to be accurate. In fact that has been found as a major weakness of the Wikipedia site, since anyone can claim to be an expert on a subject. If we are found to be non-credible in our works, we will have failed at our goal for this class.