Copyright
infringement happens when one party uses, sells, distributes, or recreates
another person’s work of authorship without the original owner’s consent. Copyright infringement can happen in a variety of ways, through many mediums, including
motion pictures, photographs, paintings, musical recordings, and literary
works.
With
the emergence of the internet, copyright infringement laws began to expand in an
effort to adapt laws to meet the growth of technology. The internet is a tool
that allows the easy retrieval of information instantaneously. This makes it
easy for information to spread quickly, though much of this information can be
copyrighted. To prevent this from happening, new intellectual property laws
have been established to protect creative works that are being spread without
consent quickly and easily over the internet.
Internet Copyright Infringement for Works on Websites
Websites are a great tool to help spread
information and show off creative works to millions of people quickly and
easily. Many people show off artwork, photography and writing on various
websites and blogs. If a person owns his or her own website, the information
that is placed on it is generally protected under current copyright laws.
Since
information flows quickly across the internet and there is such a vast amount
of it, it is quite often difficult to tell if when a person passes off creative
work as his or her own when it is not. When displaying copyrighted work,
authors are told to take extreme caution.
One way to prevent this from happening is to have
photographs watermarked with a ©. There are
also ways to digitally sign content so that the source of it is easily
determined if an internet copyright infringement case goes to court. Overall,
it is important for authors to understand that although the internet is a
useful tool for showing work, anything put on it is subject to copyright
infringement. Authors should always use caution.
Internet Copyright Infringement on Musical Works
As technology advanced further, programmers were
able to find a way to compress high quality audio into small files. Also, with
the emergence of the internet came the ease of file sharing. It was not long
before copyrighted musical work began to spread quickly throughout the internet
without artists receiving royalties.
This internet copyright infringement
became a major dispute with record companies and individuals that stole music
from internet servers across the world. New guidelines and procedures were put
in place to protect intellectual property, though it is still a major concern
today due to the evolving nature of the internet.
