Freedoms on the Internet

The internet is the world’s only remaining “free” medium, not in the financial sense, but the free speech sense. There are people who want to limit those freedoms for financial gain for themselves and their organizations. The internet is almost completely decentralized and unregulated; this allows anyone with access to a computer to look up any side of any given topic. It allows a high school band, the same medium for exposure as a professional band signed with a major record label. This is also true for every other form of intellectual property. There are a tremendous amount of issues and opinions regarding the extension of patent laws, economics, and copyright theft. The argument is weather or not freedom of speech and privacy should be compromised for the sake of the security of copyright owner’s works.

Patent laws have recently been misused to register patents for things that are common knowledge or standard practice for a great deal of the internet. One example of this is priceline.com who has essentially patented the concept of an auction with a reserve price. (Boyle, 2004) If we are granting patents to things that have been in common practice for years both within the computer world and outside of the computer world then we are essentially allowing someone to steal the intellectual property of someone else. The US Patent and Trademark Office has begun to allow patents for any program that follows through the steps of an algorithm, -- becomes a patentable machine. (Boyle, 2004) We cannot consider software concepts that are common or have multiple uses to be patentable ideas because that will limit innovation and creativity in the industry.

“Viant (a Boston-based consulting firm) estimates that some 350,000 movies are being downloaded illegally every day.” (Richardson, 2004) This statement is certainly scary to any holder of intellectual property that could be set to lose from the possibility of someone stealing their work. The flip side to this statement is that the additional exposure and visibility of any given file on the internet actually makes it easier to safeguard your works on the internet. It is truly the information age and search engines have progressed to the point where it is quite simple to search by the title of your work and find anyone that may be offering your information on the internet, with very little effort. Big business is afraid of new technologies because they leave their comfort zone and established area of control. The very short anecdote I would tell to illustrate this point is that of the video recorder. “The video recorder was seen by Hollywood as a terrible thing--like the Internet--a new copying technology that would eat the heart out of Hollywood.” (Boyle, 2004). . As Apple Computer has seen with their iTunes product in the past several years, the internet is an extremely viable medium for distributing audio content.

Established businesses around the world can see the profitability of the internet and should learn to work with this new technology instead of against it because it could be amazingly profitable in a