I attended a lecture today called, Does What We Know Belong to All? The Intellectual Property Principles by John Willinky. He talked about what happens to our resources after we leave school and about the information we learn from text books. Why aren’t all books or research papers or articles available to everyone? They would help people learn, there are many benefits from it, but for some reason, not all people are able to access certain things. When we graduate school, we are usually then cut off from online libraries and our school libraries. It doesn’t seem fair that we can no longer use these resources. John Willinsky is looking at ways to change this and help people. He also discussed public libraries. We go to a library, check out a book for up to a few weeks at a time. During the time, no one else can access it, and we may write a paper about the book, or use it in a research paper. What happens to the paper we write? Wouldn’t it be nice if people could read that paper and learn even more about the topic? It seems simple; allow all books and papers to be accessed to the public, but, it goes deeper than that because of copyrights, etc. 

It was interesting to me because of a few times people emailed me personally to use a photo I had on my website or on flickr. It was nice that they were kind enough to ask my permission when they could easily just take it. It was nice to think that my work was available for everyone to see and that people learn from it, or use it in a project they are doing. The same goes for literature. People should be able to use other authors quotes to help further their education.