Let’s start with defining Intellectual Property , it refers to creations of the mind , such as inventions , literary and artistic works , designs and symbols , names and images used in various industries from software to creative. But can you make money out of it? Yes, by selling the digital ownership of it which gives permission to access and/or use it. This ownership also lets the creator grant or revoke rights on these data. The sum of all the intellectual property . The sum of the stored data about intellectual property is called digital data treasure.

Now , staring with an example , the most frequent one we encounter in our daily lives is, buying things on Amazon , iTunes , people perceive that buying things digitally is no different except from it doesn’t occupy physical space . But this isn’t true , digital media has certain limitations too . You are only licensing it on some terms that the retailer sets, which usually aren’t even close to  ownership.Hence, we don’t really own any of the products we buy digitally any more.  Instead, we’re subjected to limitations on our use and handling of those objects that are imposed by both law and technology for example we can’t copy, sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to any third party . A Corporation dictating what you can do with a purchase is not ownership , in 2009 Amazon deleted George Orwell books from user’s devices over a copyright dispute. While in this case, Amazon refunded customers, the fact that they have the ability to erase purchased content from user devices calls ownership in the digital age into question .We have just been living under a misconception , everything we considered a product , has now become a service usually just for a limited time.

You were listening to your own sweet playlist and one song just decides not to play , but rest of the songs are playing perfectly fine ? It might not be a big deal then have you ever wondered why that happened? Blame DRM , which stands for digital rights management . That usually indicates that it is a DRM or a copyright-protected file. But songs on iTunes are no longer DRM protected and Apple Music pays only $0.00735 per play while Spotify pays $0.00437 per play. Which means artists would need hundreds of thousands of streams just to make minimum wages. This is one of the biggest ongoing issues in the music industry which hasn’t been resolved yet. The option of streaming has not only changed the entire relationship between people and music but is being really unfair to the talented and deserving music artists who are going through a financial crisis due to the evolution from Vinyl records ,CDs to a one click away application on any device. But again , the three main stakeholders here are the music artists , the customers and mainly the music streaming companies. It’s true that people are interested in things with a long life span. We cannot continue with the same model of growth in any industry. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment.We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently But doing things differently has its pros and cons . In today’s world, You never really own music, because it’s temporal, so what you own is access to it at a time of your choosing . Unfortunately the only difference between listening to the radio and streaming music , only that it’s your choice, but you don’t own any of it legally. But not every stakeholder despised streaming services, some artists took advantage of it to increase their fanbase. For example , people couldn’t stream Beyoncé’s Lemonade album anywhere but Tidal for the first three years after its release, thanks to an exclusive deal designed to  lure all her fans to the streaming service her husband owns.

Now , we have concluded that customers are surely robbed of their ownership of digital media. But what about the creators ? They have been robbed of their own intellectual property. In a world , where subscribing to a service forbids you to copy, lend sell the media due to various streaming media protocols. The same world is prone to Piracy , the term is defined as theft of intellectual property but in simple terms it’s the easy of replicability online , where the original creators lose control over their own property. We will explore different examples where it’s a boon and a blessing.

The state of the music market strongly agrees that people hardly care about ownership of digital files than they do of physical objects. Irrespective of that, Apple and Amazon’s Terms of Service forbid resale or other alienation of music files, they sell them without DRM.  DRM hasn’t been used on digital music downloads since 2009.  So, technically no streaming service  restricts customers from distributing copies of their iTunes or Amazon Music files ,users might not have “ownership rights” but surely have “ownership capabilities” on those files . People can argue on both sides of the court, some say there should be resell rights to avoid piracy , and digital goods should be treated the same as physical goods. At the same time people say digital copies are perfect and publisher’s markets would collapse. Piracy is destroying the careers of artists and bands , recording companies who are already struggling to make their way through in the market. Let’s assume a band called XYZ, has a really minute amount of followers on any of the social media platforms and just 79 views on YouTube , but due to torrent websites illegal strategies , it is known that the band has active 100,000 followers listening and downloading their music ,these false negatives leads to the band is being portrayed felonious , who are unable to earn any bread with integrity ,this not only undermines their business but ruins the capability of a generation of creative people anywhere. Musicians are revolting all round the world to draw attention to the microscopic earnings they make today. They are calling for a reform, transparency, fairness and rights. Social media was used to spread awareness and increase the breadth of this issue using the hashtags #brokenrecord , #antipiracy and #fixstreaming. Piracy is inevitable , but to make it better for the creators of intellectual property like music artists  , the government can grant musicians rights to income from streaming, so they can earn a percentage from every stream regardless of the system. This will reduce the growth of defaults in the system like Lily Allen , BitTorrent , etc.

The record labels thought they had turned the tide against piracy , Napster allowed people to easily share their MP3 files, cutting out the record labels and paying little heed to copyright. For a music industry which had long complained that home taping was killing music, this was devastation of a different order. It was followed by similar websites KaZaA and Gnutella and, as the potential of file sharing to undermine the record sales became clear, the music industry’s reaction was quick and brutal, but it had paved the way for other peer-to-peer file-sharing programmes, which continues to plague record labels today

There certainly are some advantages of privacy like globalization, it allows us to discover media that we would’ve otherwise skipped. We can say that piracy is the reason that helped the growth of certain bands and TV show on the map . If it wasn’t for privacy they might have faded away into obscurity . And For some people,  Internet piracy is the only way to access products that are otherwise unavailable in their respective countries. This advantage can be termed as self entitlement but on the other hand fairness. I will let your ethical beliefs take care of that .

I just want to end this topic with a question still unanswered, who do you think owns the copyrights of a selfie taken by a monkey provided the owner of the camera was not involved in the above creation.  Monkey see, monkey do, but monkey don’t get no copyrights.