Blog Entry 5

Chapter 4: Intellectual property rights

This raises a number of ethical issues. In the case of older books, should publishers require significant fees to be paid to them if material from one of the books is reproduced elsewhere? To what extent should this be underpinned by consideration of fair use? Is it reasonable for publishers to require significant amounts of money to be paid in relation to the reproduction of material from an old book - particularly when they know that this will not be passed on the author, or their estate? To what extent is it appropriate to simply make modifications of diagrams, and therefore avoid the payment of permissions fees? By way of a simple example, consider Figure 4.3. let us suppose that this is 'edited' by Alice and reproduced in her book in the form illustrated in Figure 4.4. To what extent (if any) is Alice guilty of plagiarism? One point to note: by not paying permissions fees, it follows that the author will not acknowledge the original source of the diagram - thus the original creative person does not receive any credit.


In the case of older books, should publishers require significant fees to be paid to them if material from one of their books is reproduced elsewhere?

• Yes, the publishers should require fees to the material being used to reproduced a book in such location, even though it’s just a part of the old book being used. the publisher before hand had a contract to the author that they will also rights in the book that will be published . so maybe that requiring fee stuff is a rights of a publisher , maybe they just follow the law of copyrights to require significant fee because of their ownership.

To what extent should this be underpinned by consideration of fair use?

• The use of fair use is that the publishers, authors or copyright owners share their ideas through their book by using the free exchange and free flow of ideas. They will give provisions to the public to use heir work in a form of Criticism, Comments, Teaching, News Reporting and Scholarship & Research

Is it reasonable for publishers to require significant amounts of money to be paid in relation to the reproduction of material from an old book- particularly when they know that this will not be passed on the author, or their estate?

• They will particularly know if there’s a book being published and relatively the same of their book they will conduct investigation if that book being published is not a plagiarized.

To what extent is it appropriate to simply make modifications of diagrams, and therefore avoid payment of permissions fees??

• It is appropriate to simply make modification of diagrams if your in a provision of fair use. When you were conducting news report, if you will criticize , if you will just comment and if your conducting a research into that diagram.

By way of a simple example, consider fig.4.3 let us suppose that this is edited by alice and reproduced in her book in the form illustrated in fig 4.4 to what extent (if any) is alice guilty of plagiarism?

• Alice is guilty of plagiarism because the diagram she edited is not his work, it’s a property of the author that she copied and just revised the structure but in the same concept.

• One point to note: by not paying permission fees, it follows that the author will not acknowledge the original source of the diagram – thus, the original creative person does not receive credit.

To what extent to such considerations apply to software ? for example , is it permissible to take another person’s code, make limited modifications to it, and represent it as ones own work?.

• This act may be considered as a bias on one side, the sin in modifying the one’s work is actually the fault of two persons, one is that, the owner (software owner) failed to apply securities and other sort of things to secure his/her work before publishing, and the other one is the modifier (the one copying the software) which is a timid person trying to impress other’s with someone’s work.