IP and the stolen Transformers diary

Response to week 2 reading assignment – January 9^th, 2011

My first thought in reading the Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog by Carolyn R. Miller, was why did anyone think that no matter how small their readership of their blog was, it wouldn’t come back to haunt them? Even in a non-electronic format, I learned this lesson as a young girl when my older brother found my diary in my bedroom.  If you are writing something down that is going to be controversial in a way that will cause problems for you more so than solve any – maybe you shouldn’t write it down in the first place.

Many of the readings this week also discussed the history of blogs and how they came long before you could post on your friends wall in myspace. My question is, why does the idea of a blog seem so foreign to people? Isn’t this the same thing as say, someone writing their own independent article in the news and review, or the stranger, or even just their own personal journal? The idea of writing your thoughts and then tossing them out for anyone to see seems familiar to the idea of writing a letter, corking it into a glass bottle and tossing it into the ocean.  Not that the history of this use of the internet is not fascinating, I am only confused why it seems new and foreign to people.  That said, I can understand the foreign concept of some of the technology used to keep up with blogs – RSS feeds for example – I use them all the time, but getting it to synch up with my own websites, my google reader and my kindle seems impossible, and I work in the tech industry!

I find it interesting that the paper by Hal R. Varian – Economics of Information Technology, mentions intellectual property (though, not actually discussed in the paper, as it was brought up in the paper of this author’s colleague).  The majority of blogs I read are about tech reviews, video and computer game reviews and web comics (blogs written by the authors of the comics) – so there is not a lot of intellectual property that is of concern in their text of the blog. Lots of blogs though have images and video links, and it is next to bloody impossible to keep people from taking those words, images and data and posting it as their own.  While this doesn’t specifically pertain to just blogging, I can understand why some mediums are hesitant to move to the electronic format, such as comic artists. It is much easier to right click – copy – paste than it was to copy out of the daily newspaper. I am interested to do some research though and see if there have been any major law suits regarding Intellectual Property that were text based, rather than the IP of say, the music industry, movie industry etc?  (We are all familiar with the history of Napster, Pirate Bay, Kazaa, etc).

Overall, I would say that the grouping and format of blogs is quite familiar to me as a regular reader, but I would like to see some more information that is widely disseminated to the public about the tools they can use with the blogs, as well as what constitutes theft of Intellectual Property.