Ever since i came to blog world this thing i have seen at many places , "Please don't copy". Similar words have been used in real life like music piracy, software piracy , plagiarism , etc . Confusing situation it is. At times hard to understand , where the line is , beyond which one should not go? Who are the actual copycats? Who are inspired one's ? What inspiration means? Too much
I shall try to touch some points on this topic which i have understood from different sourcs in last 3 years on this topic. Thanks to richard stallman , from him only almost all has come.
Let's start from some basic scenario , like , how many times we ask neighbors to help us , in india i am sure we ask for weird helps. No need to explain :P .If they say , sorry! whatever belongs to us is ours , not for you. What circumstances are to follow after this. Another example : many times we ask our friends to give us books , music CDs, movies CDs etc etc. Can this be called piracy ? if yes, then we should help our frinds and feel free to be accused of piracy.
Now some different examples. All of us use Newtons principle , E=mc^2 is used by us as if we were born to use this . Is this copying? Do we pay some royalities to newtons and Einsteins! for using their ideas? No , i think is the answer. Do theorems develpoed by mathematicians has any copyright associated. Just imagine if these great minds had kept their inventions/discoveries private or just barred others from using their ideas.
In modern world when we talk about piracy of softwares , i happily know many people are working day and night to provide many softwares for free and we can see the source code also . I am using 'linux' as operating system on my computer which is from open source and is free . All softwares installed on my computer are from open source , surely developed by great minds , without any selfishness. So share and let share is the motto to be followed by humanity.We should help others, knowing our work can help for devlopment of others.
But the question remains here , is anyone allowed to take credit for others work? .Big NO is the answer , the credit should always go to the person who deserves. We should use their work to improve ourselves , and should keep away from saying 'this is my work'. War between 'closed knowledge' v/s 'open knowledge is very much on. I wish , the open-source of knowlege is the winner.
p.s : not defending any copycats , but just my position on this topic
