To take an idea from one person is Plagiarism, to take ideas
from many people is Research.
I offer this quote, without direct reference, as a way to
summarize much of what I got from the Philip’s article. I suspect that the opening quote pertains to print materials, which seems to make the idea of Piracy a bit more cut and dried, if you like. If you are copying an entire
book, a chapter, or quoting paragraph verbatim, most of us agree that is
Piracy. Without getting into the notion of good vs bad Piracy, Philip concedes that copying entire works, movies for example, is indeed Piracy.
It is this mixing of ideas, easily facilitated in our
digital age, that stretches our current notions of Intellectual Ownership, and
hence Piracy. Much debate, it seems to me, is based on whose side you are on, the Owner or the Pirate. If Pixar spends $100 million on a new movie,
they have a substantial interest in recovering their investment, and making a
profit. To the movie buff, they have no interest in spending $24 to buy a legal copy of the same movie, when you can buy one, just as good, for $5. And to be
fair, I have seen more than one Canadian selling illegal movies out of the back
of their car, so this is not just an Asian phenomenon.
In all honesty, much of what Philip was trying to say was
lost in intellectual jargon. Her point(s), when she made one was lost in wording worthy of a thesaurus. I found much more body in Barlow’s ( p. 2)
analogy of the bottle of wine; the value was in the conveyance and not in the
thought conveyed, the bottle was protected, and yet the wine was not.
I suspect that the notion of Intellectual Property and the
Piracy of such will be debated for some time yet.
Barlow,
J.P. (1994), The Economy of Ideas, Wired,
Issue 2.03, downloaded from
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html?topic=&topic_set=