IP Rights and their Importance in the Creative Industries
Source: (x)
People constantly steal other people’s
ideas. It is a force of habit; with the internet stacked with information so freely
available at our fingertips, it is no wonder why one would feel the need to cut
and paste and claim the work as your own. But this is completely unfair to the
original source of the work.
Think of it this way: say you
were working as part of a group to produce a report, and there is one
particularly over-ambitious group
member (there usually is!) who decides to take over the group. This said person
gets so carried away that when you add your own submission to the report, they fix
any errors in it but then claim it as their own work. But it was your own ideas
that you personally spent hours and
hours creating!
I have witnessed this first hand,
the victim in question a good friend of mine. This experience distressed him greatly, his group “leader”
gave him nothing but pressure for which he got no credit. In the end, he told a superior what was happening and, after the module, vowed to never share a
group with him again.
Why does this happen? Sometimes the issue
is people are too idle and full of self-importance
these days that they think they can get
away with this sort of thing; sometimes it is caused by the stress of making deadlines.
In an article addressing how wrong it is to steal other people’s content,
author Peg Fitzpatrick speaks out,
“I can’t even imagine how many students cut and paste content at this point. Remember going to the library, taking notes, citing sources on index cards and TYPING the whole paper out on a typewriter? Granted people used to steal content then as well but, wow, it’s just way too easy now.”
Indeed, it is far too easy to steal ideas and work
anywhere. Bloggers in particular encounter this problem fairly frequently. Article
writer Nir Eyal created an article back in 2016 discussing when someone created a post incredibly similar to his about PlaceboButtons.
Disputes over stolen ideas can
last years – there is still an ongoing legal battle between rock bands LedZeppelin and Spirit, with claims that Led Zep stole their famous “Stairway to Heaven” (1971) melody from
Spirit’s “Taurus” (1968). This
complaint started 43 years ago!
To this day there are even academic
disputes about whether the poet Virgil when he was writing “Aeneid” plagiarised Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey”poems – and Virgil was writing this back in around the 20s BC!
What are
IP Rights?
Intellectual Property (IP) Rights
are the rights given to you for a
certain amount of time to stop people from stealing your work.
This includes:
- designs/inventions
- written pieces of work
- music/song pieces
- film/television
- product/brand names
Intellectual Property can be bought from the original/previous owner
and also sold to someone else.
The Creative Industries
IP Rights are particularly important in the creative
industries due to the fact that by definition the creative industries are
all about creating things. IP is needed in order for people to own the rights
of their work.
If your creation meets the Copyright, Design and Patents Act (which “gives the creators of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works the right to control the ways in which their material may be used”)
requirements, you own your work.
Most people show they own the
rights by integrating the copyright
symbol (©) somewhere into their work, which prevents copyright infringement.
This is a positive thing. However,
IP can stifle creativity because the
more ideas are taken, the more difficult it is to contribute.
Picture it as
those activities where you are to pass a sheet of paper around a room: say everyone
has to add to the list a country in the world. There are officially 195 countries in the world and let us say that this class has the same amount of students. Some will no
doubt want to show off and write the lesser-known ones.
However, for most of
the students’ cases, all the famous ones like the UK, France, Germany, Italy,
Spain, Russia, Belgium, Greece, etc. will have all been written by the time it
gets to the students sitting at the back. Even if there are some countries left
to write, the main ideas will be taken and it will be more of a struggle. The
students are the creative industry and the paper is the rights owned by people
in the world.
This raises the question of whether creativity is finite or infinite.
Source of Background Image: (x), copyright caption and symbol added on Photoshop
Web Development
It is important for anything to
have IP Rights, according to UK200Group, as “failing to take the
necessary precautions can leave you vulnerable to competitors and the creators
of commissioned work”. Web Developing is no exception to this.
For websites, there are a few rights
to consider, as stated by the Out-Law (the website for the international law
firm Pinsent Masons):
“There will be a number of intellectual property rights which exist in your website. Any logos or branding are likely to be protected by registered trade mark rights or the law of passing off. There will also be database rights in any database underlying your website. However, most of your website, including the text, design, graphics, data, website layout and any music, broadcasts, software and images on your website, will be protected by copyright.”
To conclude, it is vital that you
copyright any original work you create. If you make a logo for your website, copyright
it; if you take a photograph for your website, copyright it. Get into the habit
of copyrighting your own work – and of giving credit to other people’s work
that you use!
YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS ON THESE WEBSITES:
