So it hit me this morning.
This is a Mass Comm LAW class, correct? So the law part must have something to do with it (haha, obviously, but run with me on this).
So I started thinking. Journalism in the traditional sense is most definitely intellectual property. It is created from the mind, doing the legwork to back it up, and is rewarded for that (usually with a salary or monetary compensation). In class, Professor Kerr spoke about how if you write something on a company computer, using company resources, on company time that you are being paid for, it belongs to that company.
Does the same laws of intellectual property apply to blogs as well?
I turned to Regina McNabb from the Intellectual Property Management Office at OU and she shined some light on the situation. Although she is not a lawyer, she works with IP daily and knows what she is talking about. Since, she said, the written word on a computer is in a fixed form is copyrighted automatically, it could be considered a copyright belonging to the individual. However, it is not a fixed format–it is constantly changing, so that is a gray matter. She said it would be copyrighted, but it would be difficult to get that information registered, which brings in a whole host of other problems.
As for the University’s laws, they only include trademarks, patents and copyrights. No where in there are blogs included. Nor are blogs considered part of the employees job description, so the case can be made that IP rights belong to the individual. However, if using University computers at work (as I am doing now, oddly enough) it could be argued to belong to the University. Since there is no precedent, she couldn’t say for sure.
What she did say though, was she considers blogs put out there for the consumption of others. Therefore, she believes it can be argued that fair use applies to any blog.
Now all of that may throw my definitions out the window here.
