TechnoLogical is a weekly blog focusing on new advances in science and technology and looking critically at how the technology we already use impacts our lives. Come back next Monday for the next edition of TechnoLogical.

30 years ago, if we were to buy Michael Jackson's "Thriller" on Vinyl, saving it and giving it to our grandchildren would be one of the greatest gifts we could give from one generation to the next. The album was ours, there were no regulations stopping us from sharing it and giving it to someone else and it was liberal power that made the music industry so much simpler back then. Skip to today's era and we can't even buy a song if more than five computers are certified under an iTunes account or if we violated Apple's terms of agreements.

Over the weekend, rumors broke out in the British tabloids that famed actor Bruce Willis was suing Apple because he was concerned he could not legally pass down his vast digital music collection to his daughter upon his death. While these rumors were debunkedby Willis on Twitter, the issue over the legality of iTunes music ownership rights is very real, as it brings concern to how much grasp big corporations such as Apple and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have over copyrights and the digital music industry.

Before making a purchase on iTunes, you should know that you aren't actually buying the digital copy of the music; you are only buying a nontransferable license that allows you the right to listen to it. So theoretically, if Willis were to pass away, so would the nontransferable licenses in his iTunes library, making it illegal to redistribute and transfer his library to his daughter without any authorization.

This piece of information is buried somewhere in Apple's terms of agreement, (which I am sure we all read thoroughly page by page), but the fault does not rest squarely on Apple. Companies such as Google, Soundcloud and Amazon all have similar lines written in their terms of agreement to protect themselves from being sued by the original copyright holders, which encompasses the big record companies in the music industry and the RIAA that could sue people for hundreds of thousands of dollars. While many news coverage over this hot topic are focusing only on the Bruce Willis versus Apple drama, they forget that in the end, it's very tight regulations and laws established by the RIAA that are controlling digital copyrights and preventing people from owning music.

So what is the big deal? If he wanted to, Willis could just burn his music library from iTunes onto a storage device and give it to his daughter and the big bad record companies would never know. The problem is about paying money to buy music that you don't really own in the end and that is upsetting because it gives people a false sense of ownership.

As much as I appreciate how digital forms of communication such as the Internet have revolutionized the way we access and process information, I fear technology is evolving at such a rate that we shouldn't be integrating it into our society without first questioning it and understanding the legal obscurities we are thrusting ourselves into. If we were as meticulous in approaching copyrights and patent issues as we were with stem cell research or other controversial topics, and the many ethical disputes they bring, we probably wouldn't be in such a huge legal mess that gives big corporations leverage over digital ownership. The debacle over digital copyrights is an example of how man's reach can sometimes exceeds his grasps and we should approach innovations more conservatively.