What’s next?

There are many legal issues that plague the entertainment industry.  The rapid growth in technological advances has opened doors to more copyright and intellectual property theft.  Due to the undefined lines in copyright and intellectual property laws are often violated.  During my undergraduate degree instructors often stressed the importance of obtaining written permission for copyrighted images and music.  They recommended websites like creative commons and Getty images that allowed use of their products free or at a discounted rate.  Although the options are there many people still use, download and pirate protect products.  This is partly because everyone else does it without consequence.  Social Media and rapid advances in technology have blurred the lines of what can and should be shared.

Recent economic studies have showed changes in how and what people do and purchase.  Rachael Botsmon best described this new economic model as collaborative consumption.  Collaborative 

 Consumption describes the rapidexplosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting,gifting, and swapping reinvented through network technologies on a scale and inways never possible before.  This new model has becoming extremely successful and profitable as seen with companies such as task rabbit, eBay and Craigslist.  This also applies to the great successes of mobile apps.  The intellectual property protection for these companies and many like them were secure long before anyone knew these types of products and services were released.  How was it done?

The Facebook feud was one of the more famous and exploited stories of intellectual property theft.  This was such an explosive and interesting story that filmmakers made it into a movie.  It didn’t due to bad in the box office, but how did it play out in the courtroom?