Question

Conduct research on the Internet regarding copyrights and intellectual property. What is a copyright? What is intellectual property? How are copyrights used to protect intellectual property? What are some of the ethical considerations surrounding intellectual property and copyrights? Do you think it is ethical to use software or intellectual property without paying for it? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Intellectual Property:

Intellectual property refers to all those works that are a creation of mind such as literary works, artisitic works, names, images etc. Intellectual Property is protected by law in almost all countries there by making it necessary for someone o get rights from the owner before using a content.

Copyright:

Copyright is a type of Intellectual Property that the owners or the creators have on their own creation. Copyrights are applied on books, novels, programs, databases, music, paintaings etc.

How does Copyright work?

The creator for a fixed number of years can get copyright over their material by which without his/her consent no one can re-print/re-publish/re-distribute their material.

The owner can then print their content with copyright symbol along with year and name thereby indicating the existence of his/her rights over the material.

Ethical Considerations:

• As a user of a material that is copyrighted, one needs to know that they are using it within the law boundary i.e certain programs have copyrights which allows a programmer to use them for educational purposes but not for business purposes.
• For business use or monetary use of copyrighted material, it is necessary to get in legal writing the consent of the owner/creator depending on their terms.

The usage of intellectual property is restricted to the owner. If the owner gives his consent in writing then the user can make use of the intellectual property. But the owner also has the right to demand money for the usage of their property by someone else. So if they do demand, then it is needed to be paid. Usage of Intellectual Property without paying is a non-ethical in this case.