- What do you see as the positives and negatives around copyright?
Copyright is a system that allows people to have total ownership of their own intellectual property. This already sounds wonderful as a concept and if you take the definition given by The UK Copyright Service it seemingly gets better as it states that “ It gives the author specific rights in relation to the work, prohibits unauthorised actions, and allows the author to take legal action against instances of infringement or plagiarism.”. That’s great right? Anything new I make is protected and belongs to me. The problem with it is enforcing copyright law is expensive so if something you do does get copied, if the company is big enough, it’s probably not worth the time and resources to sue them for it. The obvious plus is that you have the right to sue them of course, but I wouldn’t call it time well spent unless you’re able to make a considerable amount of money from doing it.
References
Unknown (n.d.) Summary of intellectual property rights. The UK Copyright Service. Available at: https://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/intellectual_property
2. Is it possible to make anything new?
Absolutely. The easiest example is to shuffle a deck of cards. There are 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 possible permutations of a deck of 52 cards and based on the number of potential outcomes It is stupidly unlikely that the order of the cards in your hand has ever been seen before in all of human history. The same theory goes for simply drawing a line on a piece of paper. Has there ever been a line like it in history? There are more than likely many very similar lines but maybe the length or curvature or line weight of your line varies from them making it unique. But that is all small generally irrelevant stuff. It is definitely possible to make new things but bare in mind there will always be similarities to many other things as our minds take inspiration and ideas from everything we come across in everyday life, whether we like it or not.
References
Unknown (n.d.) One of A Kind, Quite Interesting Limited. Available at: http://qi.com/infocloud/playing-cards