The difficulty of defining and protecting intellectual property in an all-digital age.

Intellectual property is a legal field that refers to the creations of the mind such as musical, literary and artistic works, inventions including the symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce, including copyrights, trademarks, patents and related rights. In this all-digital world which is rapidly changing day by day, the intellectual property is hard to be protected anymore. Quite naturally, many of the folks who create or work at providing material available on the Internet, expect to get credit and be paid for their work. But then, trying hard to cope with globalisation, people tend to forget these rights of these property owners.
In modern societies, identifying, registering and protecting intellectual property rights (IPRs) has become one of the key drivers of business competitiveness in international trade. While intellectual property is today’s competitive instrument in global markets, exploiting and effectively protecting it is complex and difficult. Sometimes the intellectual property is hard to be defined. Furthermore, not all knowledge, innovation and creation lends itself to the existing models of industrial and post industrial societies. In this context, the value and usefulness of traditional knowledge has been widely recognized. However, there is much debate on how best to protect such a knowledge system considering its implications for various policy issues and sustainable development in general.
The existence of shareware and free sites to download multimedia files has worsen this problem.Some people love to hear music singles or watch movie trailers as a guide for them to make choices before purchasing the product. Therefore this applications would be so useful. However, it seems like many have used these free sites as a place to get free multimedia files. And even worse, some may irresponsibly make a business with the downloaded files. Some of us may think that it's better to just get a free popular single from an artiste rather than going to the music store to buy 1 whole album, which may consist "not-so-good" songs(that's going to be just a waste of money). These sites which have increased in their number are unstoppable, thus making protecting the intellectual property very difficult.
Besides that, there is also a freedom on taking information from the web to be inserted to documents. Most of the copyright conventions or statutes include a provision so that individuals may make copies of portions of a document for short-term use. If information is obtainable on the Internet, and there is no charge to access the information, it often can be shared in an electronic form. However, actually that certainly doesn't mean that the images and documents can be copied and made available on the Internet or shared in a printed form with others. But as mentioned earlier, people tend to forget. furthermore there is no action that will be taken to those who keep the documents for long term or whom has used them in their own documents.
Software privacy is another issue which concerns the intellectual property rights. The price of the original software is usually very high, therefore people would go for non-original copy that would be very much cheaper than the original 1. Here it cannot be denied, that money may became one of the causes of intellectual property rights' violation. With common sense,people may think why would they go for the expensive 1 when they can get such as the same performance with a lower price of software. We could see that as long as the original software price maintains high, more and more pirate software would be produced to meet the increasing demand, which will later make it even more difficult to act against the violation of intellectual property rights.
As intellectual property rights violation arises, some may blame the common people for not realising and caring the rights of the inventors. However, there should be a consideration from every aspects of view to create a mutual community- each of the members, either the inventors or the common users work together to solve this issue. Apart from only holding campaigns for the users to realise the rights of intellectual property, maybe the inventors should also think through the perspective of the users, providing inventions that would meet the demand, in terms of costs and usage.

is IT good or bad?

IT has both good and bad influence, but we see that it cause more good rather than bad. IT plays a role in education, business, daily life, social life and entertainment.
In education, IT helps in finding the study material, references such as journals and theses. Now students can search for references anytime, anywhere with the facilities of IT that is now widely provided. Furthermore, now students can involve themselves in E-learning, where they can access their own study portals by themselves and also have tele-conference with the lecturers. With this developed technology, they are not limited by the distance or time. As the technology is worldwide, they can have discussion regardless of how far they are from the references. This also helps a lot for those who are busy such as those who work and study at the same time, and also it enables people of all ages to study.
In business, we can see that online purchasing or auctions has become very competitive. People opt for this to save time, and they also get to know a better information of the goods or services purchased. This hence increase consumerisme, where consumers have a better knowledge and know their rights. IT also make global trading possible. Goods from a certain country can easily be promoted to other countries via internet. This can increase the export quantity of the country.
IT always help in settling personal stuffs such as paying the bills, cashing in the deposit into the bank account, booking flight tickets, etc. Along with the growth of IT, more and more services introduce online operation. This makes our daily life easier as we go along the hectic life.
IT is known as a major medium of communication nowadays. IT can unite people from different parts of the world despite of their differences. Gaps between different countries, different continents become smaller. People can know each other through the internet, sharing thoughts, making friends, searching for long-lost friend, etc. Therefore it can be said that IT unites the world.
Another thing which IT is very well-known for is for entertainment. People can search for music, videos, games, etc to enrichen their life, either by subscribing or downloading them for free. Or else life would be boring. IT also can be a medium to promote arts, talents and masterpieces. It can thus be a very useful medium to attract people's attention.
So we can conclude that IT benefited in almost everything. Therefore that can explain why we need IT just like we need our assistant in life... :-)