Intellectual Property Copyright laws have been recently under fire in the recent news. With the new technology that is known as MP3 audio (MPEG –1 Layer 3) and a program very well know to all people who live on the internet known as Napster it has made this battle very hard. Napster is a audio file sharing program. Basically it is a program that acts as a server and indexes your hard drive and adds all your MP3’s to a big database. From there other users running and connected to the main Napster servers are able to search the database and download any song that is available. This presents the problem of being able to download music that is not legally yours and that you have never paid for. Supposedly this causes loss in record sales for the artist since people can download and burn full albums on to cd’s without paying for the music (though that has not been proven yet and people claim it actually help record sales due to the fact that record sales are higher then ever). Fundamentally you are just as guilty to download music, as you are to go in a store and steal the cd from the shelf. Napster has been under fire by many artists such as Metallica and Dr.Dre as well as many of the major music labels known as the RIAA.

Napster is not the only way people have been going against the intellectual property copyright laws. Plagiarism is a very big issue that is often overlooked. Many college students and students plagiarize information they find on the net like it is different then copying a book where indeed it is just as bad. To copy someone else’s work is wrong without their permission and then even after that you need to give credit to them and label your source. Below is how easy it is to plagiarize an article off the Internet. It is seriously only 5 clicks on a mouse.

A leading Republican website was hacked just hours before polls opened Tuesday in what Republicans said was an effort to discredit their candidate, Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Late Monday the Republican National Committee's website was hacked and replaced with a lengthy anti-Bush tirade, according to RNC spokesman Tom Yu, who added that the unknown hacker also left a link to Al Gore's campaign website.

Above is the first few lines of the article from http://www.techtv.com/techtvnews/internet/story/0,3685,3009984,00.html and took less then 10 seconds to copy. Often students use the Internet to write papers and it always makes teachers a little uneasy about who really wrote the paper. In fact this very paper could be plagiarized from the net without anyone’s knowledge. Plagiarizing content is very easy and what make it very hard to stop is it is almost impossible considering there is really no way to know who wrote it first and also there is so much content that it is almost impossible to tell whether the data was ever copied.

Overall the problem is taking content or information that is not rightfully yours. As far as software piracy it is basically the same as the MP3’s. You don’t pay for a program that you will be using. With the new technology of cd burners, and broadband it has made violating the copyright laws much easier. It is true that most things that are copied are easy to copy and have no protection. But just because piracy may be unenforceable, that's no excuse to blame software manufacturers for your transgressions. As better forms of protection and encryption and such comes around this problem will be less and less abundant.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is an act that was instated in 1998 and was revised and signed in 2000. Principally it took the entire fine and major points of the normal copyright laws and just made them also for the Internet. Anything on the Internet is automatically copyrighted to the owner of the content creator unless otherwise specified in a contract that was agreed upon. That means that the © sign does not have to be there for the content to be copyrighted. The act was about 52 pages and the summary was 20 pages so to read up more on the law you can visit http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html, or http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/band.html for more information. To read those acts you should have some background in law because they go into many in-depth detail that was impossible to understand.

So where do average people stand on these issue? Even though the fact of going into a store and stealing the cd is exactly the same as downloading music many people who would never steal the cd still download the music. The law instated is very fair and is considered fair to the person who owns the original content. Would you like the stuff you spend hours working on to be free for anyone to use without your permission? The law protects the people who own the content and gives them the ability to sue for loss of revenue or for any damage as we can see in the ongoing Napster trial. This law does protect all people and doesn’t discriminate against people. People who don’t have broadband to download MP3’s or don’t have burners probably don’t even have to bother being in a problem with copyright infringement. This is another way to just reinforce and reiterate laws that have existed for quite a long time in the real world. With children and students aware of these laws hopefully they will think twice before they turn in an Encarta Encyclopedia report to their teacher. This is a form of protection of private property and before this problem gets any better in the near future it will only get worse.

Bibliography
http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html Date Visited 11/01/00

http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/band.html Date Visited 11/01/00

http://www.techtv.com Date Visited 11/01/00

http://www.cybercrime.com Date Visited 11/01/00

http://library.thinkquest.org/26658/links.html Date Visited 11/01/00

Alex Wallen, Cyber Crime Analyst. TechTV studios, San Francisco, CA Date E-mail 10/28/00

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