(Re-post of the Editorial of MINDANAO DAILY MIRROR from August 21, 2012 with friendly permission of the Publisher and Editor in Chief Mrs. Marietta Siongco.)
Senator Vicente "Tito" Sotto, or at least his chief-of-staff, Hector Villacorta, have unwittingly given the go-signal for everyone in the Philippines to take everything in the internet and using it in any way possible without having to attribute the source - indeed, we can now even claim the words, pictures, music, and other creations of other people as our own without fear of being taken to court. This scenario has come out after Villacorta, in explaining Sotto's apparent plagiarism of blogger Sarah Pope, said Philippine law still regard the Internet as public domain and that no liabilities should be raised when information was taken from this source.
This means Filipino students from now on can copy-paste any work taken from the Internet and use it for their term paper, theme writing, essays, and other school work and not be scolded by their teachers. Online publications can take any article, photograph, art work, music - literally anything - from any online source and publish it without having to pay the artists, or even inform them. And yes, government officials can swipe the research of other people and use them for their own purposes, without having to do their own work and without even having to verify if the research is accurate.
if that scenario sounds absurd to you, that's because it is. In the irst place, it is not true what Villacorta said: we do have the Intellectual Property Code o the Philippines, officially known as Republic Act No. 8293, which holds that copyright is automatically given for creative works. While the Internet is not explicitly mentioned, the fact is that blog posts - or any other material on the Internet - are owned by their creators and as such much not be appropriated without attribution. Any use of the material without proper citation is tantamount to stealing. Everyone knows that - except, apparently, for Sotto and his people.
