What is Intellectual Property? Most people knows what it means, but it can be useful to take a look at the defination of these words. What does intellectual property mean for us - the people who use Internet?
When I started to write this blogpost, my son came up to me and asked what I was doing. I told him that I had to write about Intellectual property, and he asked "what is intellectual property"? After explaining the meaning, his reaction was "no one cares about that, everybody is downloading".
The right to protect our photos, music, texts etc, beeing used by others without permition, is maybe not taken seriously enough. We knows it is illegal to walk into a music store and steal a cd, and most of us don`t do that. But a lot of people hava no concerns when they download pictures, music and poems which belongs to author.
Why don´t people in general respect intellectual property? It is very easy to download for example pictures and music from Internet. I think this is one of the reasons. It has become available and easy to reach for everyone who are online and when they download these things, they don´t feel like a thief. It is a lot of websits which offers shared content; Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Well, my opinion is that intellectual property is a topic that deserves attention in school. It is a topic that I, as a teacher, easily can bring further on to my students by making them aware of the problem. It is not OK to "steal" from the Internet by downloading other peoples property, and it is several places where it is possible to find what you are looking for, for free or by paying for it.
Intellectual property in digital age.
