Protect intellectual property to gain from creativity

Recently I met a friend who informed me he has over 1,000 favourite songs saved on his laptop that he has downloaded from the Internet.

Despite this large database of pirated music, he continues to download on an average of at least 10 songs a day.

He has not invested a single shilling in acquiring this music but now has one of the largest collections of good oldies soul music in the country.

He represents many early adopters who are taking full advantage of the vastness of cyberspace to acquire content free of charge.

As our country continues to invest heavily in ICT infrastructure and the use of broadband applications continues to expand, we cannot ignore the intellectual property (IP) subject.

As we all know, the music copyright society has taken very many years to establish and enforce copyright laws that protect their creations.

All you have to do is take a stroll down River Road with a couple of blank CDs to burn.

Chances are that music store owners will most likely treat you with a lot of suspicion and decline to burn any music for you at any price.

It took the local music industry a long time to reach where they are today.

Consider how long it will take to protect and enforce the IP rights of our local software developers in cyberspace.

With the talk of cloud computing, chances are that local technology geeks stand to lose if they do not protect their innovations.

In the new technology economy in which major resources are intellectual assets, we need to think about how to protect our creations.

This has to be done within a context of elusive questions about the precise nature and extent of those rights.

However, the reality of the matter is that there are two distinct schools of thought on the IP issue.

One takes the pathway of the philosopher John Locke.