Please Respect Intellectual Property

Hello, my fellow aspiring netpreneurs!

For today’s article I especially did a resources research on intellectual property. I did this on purpose to raise your awareness on how crucial an intellectual property is and why we need to respect it.

It started off by a real case that I recently involved in. As I wrote in my previously posted article, I attended Ewen Chia’s Autopilot Internet Income workshop. Well, it turned out that somebody among the participants had given out the username and password which were supposed to be for members only. It absolutely violated intellectual property or intellectual rights and had made others who didn’t commit this violation also tangled in this unpleasant situation.

This case has become a serious case that Ewen finally removed the members’ area site. There had been some actions taken by some participants. I and Mr. Christ Jusuf (Hello, Pak Christ) had invited some of our friends to gather in an informal meeting in order to resolve this. The resolution is currently in progress. (Note: If any member of autopilot-indo is reading this, please read the results of our discussions in our autopilot-indo mailing list or contact The Jubilee Network)

I am not going to elaborate on the case. Instead, I will share some information I acquired about intellectual property (IP). In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain names, written and recorded media, and inventions. The holders of these legal entitlements are generally entitled to exercise various exclusive rights in relation to the subject matter of the IP. The term intellectual property reflects the idea that this subject matter is the product of the mind or the intellect, though the term is a matter of some controversy.

Intellectual property laws confer a bundle of exclusive rights in relation to the particular form or manner in which ideas or information are expressed or manifested, and not in relation to the ideas or concepts themselves. The term "intellectual property" denotes the specific legal rights which authors, inventors and other IP holders may hold and exercise, and not the intellectual work itself.

Intellectual property laws are designed to protect different forms of subject matter, although in some cases there is a degree of overlap, such as copyright, patent, invention, trademark, businesses, industrial design right, and trade secret.

For more information, you can always go to search engines and look up the word “intellectual property”. I have also provided the links for the important words above for you to read further on Wikipedia. Well, it wouldn’t be necessary for me to go deeper on the subject through this article. The sole purpose of this article is, again, to raise your awareness about intellectual property and, hopefully, you will be encouraged to respect it.

Nobody can control this but YOU. So, if you currently have a plan to somehow violate someone’s intellectual property by doing unauthorized copying of any kind, please think it over. You will be acting against the law, that’s for sure. But, the most devastating part is that you will “abuse” those who own the specific intellectual property. Just imagine, how would you feel if you’re in his/her shoes?