Copyright Challenges Of The Modern Digital Economy Essay

One of the most common, yet controversial, issues of First Amendment law is the subject of copyright and infringement. Although the subject may not seem major at first, many different issues and controversies have risen and become more common than ever over the years. The issues that have become pertinent to this subject are endless, including trademark infringement, piracy, theft, fraud, plagiarism, and many more. With the coming of age and advancement of technology, these cases have become more common and appear more often than ever before. Government officials have always been strict about copyright rulings, and have tried to deliver fair and just rulings for both parties involved under First Amendment rules. Because the owner’s work and material is protected under the First Amendment, it gets tricky when involving another party that can claim the same work of art. In short, the definition of copyright has always been cut and dry: allowing owners of creative works the right to control and profit from their creations. It is basically recognized as a form of property ownership.

The pervasive nature of the Internet has made the copying of music and software exceptionally easy, fast and for the most part, undetectable. The ubiquity of the Internet and the speed at which music and software can be copied is also changing the sociological and legal aspects of computing as well (De George, 2006). For the first time the availability of technology is driving a level of expertise with computer users globally that give them the opportunity to capture, distribute, duplicate and even re-publish massive amounts of intellectual property that isn't theirs (Wilson, 2007). This is forcing the issue of copyright infringement and the protection of intellectual property at a global scale. In so doing, this dynamics is also re-ordering ethics surrounding all forms of digital content as well.

Fair use is the right to use copyrighted materials without the copyright owner’s permission. Permitting limited and reasonable uses without permission as long as they do not prejudice the copyright owner’s rights or interfere with normal exploitation of the work. Thus, fair use is intended to allow the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials for the benefit of society, believing such use serves a higher purpose. But fair use has its limits, too. Section 107 of the Copyright Act states that:

Copyright is the legal right, to an inventor to perform, print, publish, film, or record artistic, literary, or musical material, and to allow others to do the same. Copyright law was developed to provide the creators and inventors of any works with powerful and effective rights of exclusivity over their creations (Patterson & Lindberg, 1991). Over the past, these rights were almost unlimited. People would use existing developments as if they were their own without any regard of the creator’s exclusive rights. The need to balance and limit such rights arose, and governments established these limits for the general good of the public.

The purpose of the copyright system has always been to promote creativity in society and protect the creators’ interests. In applying copyright laws to any creation, three basic guidelines apply. First is the fair return for a creators labor, second is “Fair Use” of the creators’ labor and finally the Progress of Science and useful Arts to further the public good. The application of these three guidelines in litigation for A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, found that the rights of reproduction, and distribution had been violated, in effect upholding the copyrights of nineteen different music companies represented under A&M Records name, this ruling had protected the music industries interests. However it would seem that the publishing industry would not be so lucky, litigation in Authors’ Guild vs. Google ruled that Google’s actions constituted fair use. Under these two scenarios’ the copyright laws’ have, effectively, protected the rights of music artists’, protected the public’s right to “fair use” and sparked new opportunities for creative growth. However, lawmakers continue to struggle to define copyright boundaries between the public’s right of use and the creators right to profit from their efforts.

In the article “Recut, Reframe, Recycle”, the authors state that the four factors that the Copyright Act refers to when considering fair use are: 1). The purpose and character of the use, 2). The nature of the copyrighted work, 3). The amount of the work that was used, and 4). The effect on the potential market for value of the copyrighted work (profit). The purpose of the “Fair(y) Use Tale” remix film was intended for entertainment and educate viewers about copyright and fair use principles. The film was noncommercial, creative

One myth is that copyright campaigns that are widely available to schools are a good source of copyright information. In actuality, these programs with characters like Copyright Captain, Copyright Kids, and Donny the Downloader are usually created by publishing companies who have a biased interest in preventing many fair uses of their materials. These campaigns often unfairly criminalize many fair use applications. Another myth is that fair use rules are rigid. This is far from the truth. Fair use is very flexible. American Library Association copyright expert, Carrie Russell, says that you may never know if your decision that a use was fair was right. The only way to know for sure is if a court decides. You just have to use the guidelines and trust your best judgment. Another myth is that the risk to educators in copyright issues is high. Although criminal copyright conviction is a felony it just doesn’t happen. Because fair use is vague there is a lot of wiggle room in its interpretation. One last myth is that school copyright policies are good references for determining if a use is fair. These policies are usually written by district lawyers who are worried about worst case liability and are overly restrictive as a

Multiple laws are set when people create or post videos. The most important law is copyright. Videos will get copyrighted if the user uses a piece of material that is not theirs. A copyright on a piece of an author’s work is a form of protection that gives the author the ownership to that work. For example, books, music, and arts have a copyright symbol so that no one else can get credit besides the author who created it. Another law that is the fair use law. Fair use gives copywriters the right to use apart or all of their work. Fair use allows people to use work for criticism,

The rise of the Internet era opened the whole new market for traditional media full of opportunities as well as threats. Online piracy being one of them because the music and film industry loses £5.4bn in a year and if it was reduced by 10% it could have created up to 13 thousand jobs in the UK. There are various attempts taken to fight with online piracy; a case study of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will be considered as well as other legislations attempting to regulate copyrights in the Internet. This

The enduring fascination for people is that they want law to be flexible in the matter of copyright. This was clearly expressed by Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of Consumer Focus quoting "UK copyright law is the oldest, but also the most out of date. Before addressing the question it’s important to look at the history and definition of UK Copyright law. It has grown from this beginning to form the main legal basis for the international publishing industry, which contributes so much to literature, learning and culture not only in the UK but it has crossed different nation’s borders.

An alternative emerging approach for licensing music, software, research paper and many other resources on the internet, creative common sharing copyright, is introduced.

In light of the AUSFTA, Australia has significantly amended its copyright legislation to be more in line with American copyright law. However, Australia has yet to adopt American-style fair use doctrine. In Australia, an otherwise infringing use of copyright material can only be fair if the dealing was for one of five specified purposes. American fair use doctrine, in comparison, is more open-ended and not limited to a set of specific purposes. Rather, a test consisting of four non-exhaustive factors is applied on a case-by-case basis for determining whether an impugned use is ‘fair’. The first of the fairness factors is the ‘purpose and character of the use’ which essentially concerns whether the use is transformative. The definition used by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) is the use of “pre-existing works to create something new, that is not merely a substitute for the pre-existing work.” In some analyses, whether a use is transformative has become the key question in

Copyright infringement is the unauthorized use of copyrighted material in a manner that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works that build upon it.

Recently, I visited YouTube in an attempt to watch a show that I enjoyed from my childhood. I was delighted to find that an entire episode of the show had been posted on YouTube, so I added the video to my queue and planned to watch it at a later time. The next day, I went to go watch the video. To my surprise, the video displayed a red box with a message that stated that the video was unavailable. In 2009 you could easily find copyrighted works on the Internet. It was simple to log in to YouTube and search a movie or television show and watch it in its entirety, the only annoyance being that it was usually split up into five parts. If you were to try to do that today, you would quickly realize that you could not find a free version of the show or movie anywhere on YouTube. In fact, it’s quite difficult to find a free version of a large number of copyrighted material online. This is because websites such as YouTube have updated their copyright infringement policies. But lately it is the case that it is quite difficult to even find a legal version of copyrighted material. A lot of critics feel as if online content is being fenced off due to the extreme copyright laws. However, the owners of the proprietary information feel as if the laws were not in place, they would lose the rights to the property. To create an ethical balance between those who hold legal rights to proprietary information and ordinary users who wish to access, share, and communicate that information, it is

These rules require rigidly the users of fair use can not unjustly earn money by using these works, then the nature of the copyrighted work that can not do harm to the copyrightholder, at the same time the use which can decrease the value of the works in future market is also prohibited (Prasad and Agarwala, 2008:253). Consequently, the key point of determining whether Google’s project constitute infringement is a full fair use analysis.