Intellectual property: student feedback

[amyjko]

"Whatever your argument for ownership, one cannot construct a notion of idea ownership without clarity about what an idea is. As we discussed above, that is not clear, so ownership is not clear either."

What are your thoughts on the proliferation of sites like GitHub, Instructables, and Thingiverse where people may share their source codes and ideas. Some ask for credit, some might not. Some modify codes to make it their own, but at which point is it theirs, and not whose source of inspiration it is? You touch upon the ambiguity in ownership in the section "Can ideas be owned?", but it would be interesting to note sites that promote collective idea sharing and what that has to do with the future of ownership.

"Designers strongly believed that the look and feel of user interfaces should not be given protection by copyright or patent law"

As aforementioned in the section for "Help", do these apply to only the traditional screens that we're used to? If we were to adhere to Weiser's view of ubiquitous computing, how many ways can we really design non-screen interfaces? What are the laws like for this in terms of what can actually be designed? Are there issues with the Google Home vs. Amazon's Alexa etc. Are these types of interfaces guided more so by technology and what's actually possible, usable, and feasible as opposed to more creative and unique?

[amyjko]

1. “Inthischapter,we'lldiscussthesethreequestions,andreviewsomeofthe more notable precedent in copyright and patent law in the United States.” a. “Three” questions is stated but there are five questions posted above. Perhaps “three” can be removed or replaced with “five.”
2. “I nacademicresearch,ideasaren'ttreatedasdiscretethings.Newideasare combinations of old ideas, and the extent to which an idea is novel depends on how many ways it differs from prior inventions, and by how much. This is a multidimensional, subjective assessment often woven into peer review. "New" ideas are often attribute to specific researchers, but since research papers heavily cite the prior ideas upon which they were based, ideas are actually a composition of a complex interconnected web of prior ideas.” a. I really like the way this was broken down. It made me look at “new” technological innovations in different ways.
3. “Ifyouthoughtofsomethingwhileathomereadingworkemail,wasityouridea or the company's idea?” a. This is something I really struggle with. I personally feel like there are many cases where the idea should belong to the person more than the company, although I know this is a controversial stance. Is there a real-life example that can be shared where an employee of a company had an idea and the company tried to claim it, but the employee won? I feel like reading about such an example will ground this reading that much more.
4. “Designersstronglybelievedthatthelookandfeelofuserinterfacesshouldnot be given protection by copyright or patent law” a. Please add a period at the end of this sentence.

[amyjko]

Resolved the typos.