week 14 blog
The focus of this week is to make some headway on my assingments which are due next week. However, I have done other activities, such as working at woolworths in the deli, which is getting quite interesting lately as many of the customers are resorting to shop lifting and most of the time getting caught. This is fairly enterataining watching from afar as the looks on thier faces are priceless, just goes to show how the recession is affecting people.
on the topic of stealing, there has been much debate concerning the popular Twitter site, where users are argueing about whether or not they own copyrights to thier own tweets. While many agree with this others claim that most tweets contain material that is taken from other people and therefore to copyright such material is in itself a breach of copyright.
Brock Shinen, a buisiness, intellectual property and entertainment attorney wrote and article on the matter. In his article he outlines the key points about the debate and twitter’s stance on the matter.
“Twitter (and Facebook, Myspace, etc.,) are not capable of modifying copyright law to create a property right that does not otherwise exist. If the material you post through Twitter isn’t copyrightable to begin with, it will not mystically transform into protectable property merely by being Tweeted.” -Shinen
One peculiar thing i noticed about Shinen’s document was that he talks about US copyright laws, which had me asking does this cover other countries? I looked on the US Copyright site and it appears that there are treaties in place that make these laws have an effect in other countries, however, not all countries have agreed to this and therefore do no have to adhere to such claims of infringement.
Anyway Shinen goes on to further talk about how copyright laws were created to give incentive to artists and scientists to go on creating and discovering without fear that they have no claim over thier intelectual material and then on to explaining how ‘tweets’ are not copyrigtable.
