The Internet is an ideal communication mechanism because of its openness and ano

Question

The Internet is an ideal communication mechanism because of its openness and anonymity but people must make ethical decisions about how to use this power. Intellectual property is a work of the mind, such as art, books, formulas, inventions, and processes that are distinct and created by a single person or group. Copyright law protects authored works such as art, books, film, and music. Patent law protects inventions, and trade secret law helps safeguard information that is mission critical in an organization.

Discuss how freedom of expression and intellectual property rights might ethically conflict. In your reply, consider how your own freedom of expression might affect your privacy or personal intellectual property. Please provide examples when possible.

Explanation / Answer

In those dark days of disconnect, in the early years of the final decade of the last century in Delhi, we plugged into each other's nervous systems by passing a book from one hand to another, by writing in each other's notebooks. Connectedness meant conversation. A great deal of conversation. We became each other's databases and servers, leaning on each other's memories, multiplying, amplifying and anchoring the things we could imagine by sharing our dreams, our speculations and our curiosities.

At the simplest level, the Internet expanded our already capacious, triangulated nervous system to touch the nerves and synapses of a changing and chaotic world. It transformed our collective capacity to forage for the nourishment of our imaginations and our curiosities. The libraries and archives that we had only dreamt of were now literally at our fingertips. The Internet brought with it the exhilaration and the abundance of a frontier-less commons along with the fractious and debilitating intensity of de-personalized disputes in electronic discussion lists. It demonstrated the possibilities of extraordinary feats of electronic generosity and altruism when people shared enormous quantities of information on peer-to-peer network and at the same time it provided early exposure to and warnings about the relentless narcissism of vanity blogging. It changed the ways in which the world became present to us and the ways in which we became present to the world, forever.

The Internet expands the horizon of every utterance or expressive act to a potentially planetary level. This makes it impossible to imagine a purely local context or public for anything that anyone creates today. It also de-centres the idea of the global from any privileged location. No place is any more or less the centre of the world than any other anymore. As people who once sensed that they inhabited the intellectual margins of the contemporary world simply because of the nature of geo-political arrangements, we know that nothing can be quite as debilitating as the constant production of proof of one's significance. The Internet has changed this one fact comprehensively. The significance, worth or import of one's statements is no longer automatically tied to the physical facts of one's location along a still unequal geo-political map.

While this does not mean that as artists, intellectuals or creative practitioners we stop considering or attending to our anchorage in specific co-ordinates of actual physical locations, what it does mean is that we understand that the concrete fact of our physical place in the world is striated by the location's transmitting and receiving capacities, which turns everything we choose to create into either a weak or a strong signal. We are aware that these signals go out, not just to those we know and to those who know us, but to the rest of the world, through possibly endless relays and loops.

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