First of all it is never ok to take someone else's information or product as your own. That said there are some laws regarding intellectual property (IP) that is much too strict and restrict the uses even in academic studies. This is especially true in a university setting where the only way students can learn about something is to learn from the past, and that sometimes has to be copying great works that comes before him/her. Fields such as music, literature, and other creative fields of study require the knowledge of those that came before, and to learn from them. Since this is for educational and academic purposes, there is no reason not to let us use these information because we are not receiving any kind of monetary gain from this whatsoever. The sole purpose of this is to learn so that we may better whatever industry we decide to go into. There is almost no downside other than giving credit to the originator of that information. And since plagiarism or not citing the originator is the only crime, there is no reason. Incorrectly citing or forgetting to cite a resources can potentially cost an "innocent" college student millions of dollars in copyright infringement fines. This has happened many times in the past from multinational companies who probably lost little to no profit at all from that student's actions. And since it is only for educational reasons and that student is receiving no monetary profit at all, there should be no problem letting them access to that information.
A great example of this is students of law schools are provided and encouraged to use several databases from large companies who keeps these databases for real lawyers for free in the student's studying years in hopes that once they graduate that they are so used to the service that they will rely on it, and therefore pay for the actual service. This type of action where the service or information is so good that there is no need to be so strict on its policies because people wil be enticed to pay for it. Same can be applied to downloading music. In this remix generation there are so many remakes. A student in the music production and creation fields of study should be able to download music for free in order to learn the intricacies of that soundtrack and how to remix or even just to understand how to create good music.
There are also other laws that state and can be argued that works such as this blog post or even anything that we produce in a college classroom is technically the property of the university in which it was created at. Even though this sounds ridiculous there are many agreements to which we sign that actually state this. Everything that we create in physical form and now, some can be even in virtual form and they are automatically copyrighted under whomever its creator might be. But the university law overwrites that ruling and makes our works into their property. A great example of this is that say you write an amazing essay for a class in an english class for fall semester. Then you take another class for spring semester but another essay requires you to so the same research that you already did the previous semester and have already written a paper on that subject. Now you may think that there is no harm in using the part or most of the original paper because you are the creator and writer of that essay, when in reality that original paper now belongs to the university. And because of this even if you copy your own creation, you will still be punished for plagiarism for using the property of the university. That's right, you can't use your own paper from one class to the next because it technically doesn't belong to you.
It is these areas of academic research and overall strict procedures in which we can use outside and copyrighted material that limits our own learning and creativity. Back in the day Shakespeare used many of his predecessors' works to make his own. So today we should be albe to "stand on the shoulders of giants" in order to progress our own intellect because if we can't learn what has already come before us how can we produce anything that tries to improve upon what we already have? In this respect our work should belong to us and we should also be allowed more freedom in the intellectual property and copyrighted works, because we are only using it for educational means and not for any profitable gain.
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