This post is a continuation of the post below-
Intellectual Property Rights - Part1?
Intellectual
Property as we have understood from the last post is a simple idea that
has been made complex by laws. But this laws are important in preventing
people/organizations from stealing the creative output of a
person/organization. As we have seen from the previous post that the
laws also protect the rights of people/organizations that support a
person's/organizations creative activity by providing them a platform to express their intellectual ability.
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How do digital companies use our intellectual output to make money?
When it comes to the all encompassing digital universe that even plans to hijack even our perceived reality, most people who are fighting for the rights of ordinary citizens privacy has to take into consideration the discussion on Intellectual property laws and Copyright laws. Since digital companies employ convenient definitions of customers(as users of platform), they define their software as platform.
Lets say you buy a smartphone XYZ brand with ABC companies OS software. You already paid for the System(Smart phone) but the OS provider says we are giving you free platform to use. This is because your smartphone manufacturer is too lazy to make an OS for the system you bought. They wanted to pass the cost of OS or the cost of not paying(free lunch is more dangerous as evident from real world events) to the customer. By buying and using a smartphone with free ABC OS software you are in effect agreeing to allow the copyright of digital content generated in the phones. Thus all digital data that is generated in the smart phone can be copied without our permission as we had agreed to share the data as part of using their "platform". Thus ABC company makes millions using intellectual property generated by users.
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This is like a recording company making millions from a singers album and not giving him a penny because the stupid singer agreed to sing for free just for the opportunity to sing for the recording company(i.e for giving him a "platform"). The big companies don't want ordinary people to understand this, as then people will start asking for share in the monetization of their intellectual property. Or the people can ask the smartphone manufacturers for OS that gives full intellectual property and copyright protection for digital data generated in the smartphone that was purchased from them for a price. But this requires worldwide awareness by people of Intellectual property and copyright laws.
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Privacy and data ownership rights
If as a single voice the people of this world can demand the ownership of digital data/content generated in their digital devices and also take away the right of other companies to define each component of the digital device system differently as platform/hardware, so that we need not end up begging for privacy from these mega corporations. Because IP theft is considered by international law as theft itself. Creative digital content and personal data has to be defined clearly and isolated to identify violation of Intellectual Property laws by big transnational corporations.
Thus privacy essentially can be achieved only by means of right to data ownership of digital content generated in the digital device that you purchased from market. In fact both creative digital data and personal digital data are both intellectual property since it comes from your intellectual faculty. If someone is making money from it then you can stop using the platform or force the platform manufacturer to share the income they generate from using the digital data that was generated by using their OS.
OS manufacturers give you limited ownership of the OS copy.
The companies however are really clear over the use of their own software. The smartphone owner does not own copyright or Intellectual property of the OS Software but is free to use the OS "in exchange for" the user(not customer) agreeing to the long list of conditions that include the sharing of the digital data generated in the smartphone(please read the word in exchange for) for which we cannot claim copyright violation as we did not copyright protect it. This is called limited ownership or limited permission to use the OS. If we try to Copyright protect it then the OS manufacturer can deny the use of OS to the smartphone owner. For this the approach should be to put pressure on smart phone manufacturers themselves rather than on OS manufacturers.
Yes, I know it is a lot to ask for responsibility or ownership from simple folk like us, also easiest thing to do is to throw your phone in the gutter.😂. after all what we wanted was a bit of free software in our phones. At least I did my part in creating awareness.
If you still awake you can enjoy more nerdy stuff at Part 3 of this blog -
What is Intellectual Property Rights-Part 3?
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Tchao friends.
Interested blog
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