Wikipedia will shut down for the day tomorrow in protest against the US Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act.
I must admit to being a regular Wikipedia user. Not just for personal use but I find it a really useful source of business information. What did the acronym ARM originally stand for? Just one of the things I looked up yesterday. I’m also constantly surprised by how up to date it is. Often I will be researching a news story only to find that Wikipedia has beaten me to it! So, it is more than likely that I will miss this resource tomorrow.
Then there is the ever increasing debate on ‘piracy’. SOPA may be a US Act but, as we saw from the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer last week (this British 23 year old had produced a website giving links to sites where you could download pirated copies of films), what the US does can have a direct effect on us too.
There is a really important issue here. On the one hand, IPR is important. We here at TechMarketView would defend our IPR with rigor. Conversely, business models have changed so radically that the legal issues are blurred. For example, much music is already ‘freely available’ and most people do not consider borrowing a CD from a friend and ripping it to an iPod as illegal. The music industry, as a whole, is in rude health as revenues from live music have more than made up for declines in recorded music.
TechMarketView, of course, also gives HotViews away for free and is often quoted (without our express permission) by other media. An increasing number of people are re-tweeting our articles. In the main, that is all really good for our business. But say if someone got hold of the research behind the paywall and decided to resell it? Of course, we would take every action to protect our IPR.
That line between what is permissible, and what is not, can only get more blurred and the IPR debate will get more heated.