Intellectual Property
Table of Contents
Follow our current trend, this week are discussing Intellectual Property.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual Property, or IP, is a subject that is constantly present in the life of the professional who works in the production of software. If you use a platform to create your repository such as Gitlab, Github, Bitbucket, among others, they are already made available to the user, when creating the repository, add the software license. Every programmer has already reused something he found ready on the internet, and, in theory, he would have been aware of the license on the piece of software he is reusing. If it gives you the right to commercial use, if you have to open the code or if you can even copy it for use and it is not there exclusively for educational purposes.
According to Eduardo Ariente’s lecture, intellectual property is the right of temporary exclusivity over the economic exploitation of a given creation of a technical nature (patents, software), artistic (copyrights), or indication of origin of products or services (trademarks). And this is directly linked to scientific, technological and industrial development and social rights such as education, health and culture. In Brazil, we have a small peculiarity. Here the software, according to the seventh article of the LDA (9.610/98) and the second article of the Software Law (9.906/98), the software is interpreted as an artistic and non-technical creation, therefore, according to the code that governs us, software is an artistic creation of the developer(s).
Opinions regarding software patents are still very controversial and diverse here in Brazil and in the rest of the world. There is the group of favorable ones, which for the purpose of illustration, I will compare with the extreme right in the political sense, composed of large companies and large companies, focuses on the argument that the patent is what will reward the investment in search. The intermediaries, made up mainly of big names in the field such as Lawrence Lessig, Marian Mazzucato, who are like the center politicians, want patents for some groups of products/services but with rules. And, finally, the most critical patents, which here, as you can imagine, are on the extreme left, where among the great names that evangelize for a world without patents, we can mention the Open Knowledge Foundation, Richard Stallman , where the main argument revolves around that knowledge should be public, that there are ways to profit even with open knowledge (such as Red Hat and CentOS).
Finally, according to Professor Eduardo’s lecture, the creators of IP almost do not earn from their creations, the income is mostly with the corporations that publicize and commercialize them. For example, the creator of Mafalda, licensed worldwide, claims that he didn’t earn much from his creation, an artist with a song with 3 million plays on Spotfy only earned seventeen dollars. Many companies register generic and vague patents only for what was presented as “Patent Trolling”, where it only aims to take a technology from a competitor, win in legal proceedings, market concentration. We need to fight to live in a world that the free software community has been living in for a few years. A place where knowledge is public and everyone helps each other to advance as a species in technology. After all, in the world of software development, even if private, progress is only possible like this, with all programmers sharing knowledge. And why not the same could not apply to pharmaceuticals, chemical industry, hardware?
Conclusion
That its folks! Thank you for following up until here, and if you have any question or just want to chat, send me a message on GitHub of this project or an email. Am I doing it right? Was it a good hello world post for the blogging community?
https://github.com/lbenicio/lbenicio.blog
# Conclusion
That its folks! Thank you for following up until here, and if you have any question or just want to chat, send me a message on GitHub of this project or an email. Am I doing it right?
https://github.com/lbenicio.github.io