Assignment #5 - Give Me Credit!!!

1.) Your uncle owns a sandwich shop. He asks you to write an inventory program for him. You are glad to help him and do not charge for the program. The program works pretty well, and you discover later that your uncle has given copies to several friends who also operate small food shops. Do you believe you should be paid for copies?

I do believe that it is just right that I deserve proper credit for making that program. And that doesn't mean anything valuable like cash or a percent of his income, a simple thank you would do. Thank you to some person including me does alot of things. And saying thank you would mean everything to me and would make me feel that I have done something important.

2.) Read articles by Esther Dyson and Lance Rose from Wired. Write a short essay telling which author’s views about the future of intellectual property in "digital age" are more convincing to you and why.

Both authors for me has their own points in the idea that they present in their essays. However, I would say that Esther Dyson's idea is much more correct than that of Lance Rose. This is because I do believe that one must be proper compensated in everything that he had created, innovated or what he had written. Ofcourse, people only get to pay what interest him, so it is only right to market artists' works by giving others a taste of what they are going to get when they pay. This would also preserve the author's right since what would be posted in the Internet would be just a part of it, maybe an excerpt of a writing, low quality jpegs for paintings and artistic works and a trial version of a software.

Ofcourse, the use of the Internet would be judged as a bad thing for Intellectual Property Rights because production of authored works will be easier and faster due to the fact that connection between us all is available in any geographical location (Internet is even available for those austronauts on the outer space, :>). However, we can use this reality to benefit our side. One instance is the web can be used to promote our innovation and attract more possible users and customers that may benefit on the use of it.

As stated on the quote above by Robert Stallman, the real definition of Intellectual Property Rights is indeed confusing and it gets much more complicated when the property is integrated into the World Wide Web. Well, I guess one could atleast make it a little simpler when we learn to respect each other.