And more than 800 Internet users have settled their cases by paying roughly $3,000 each in fines and promising to delete their illegal song collections. (Bridis, 2004) Such individuals, who have little chance of defending themselves when confronted with the recording companies' high-powered lawyers, have invariably had to plead guilty and pay the fines
These new organizations circumvented the ruling against infringement of the copyright laws by using peer-to-peer network sharing, without the need for a central Web site like Napster's. (Burgunder, 2002 p
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when music was sold in the form of printed "sheet music," pirates took advantage of a the-then newly developed technology called photolithography and sold duplicate copies of the 'legal music' at half the price -- causing great annoyance among the music publishing companies. (Johns, 2002, p
4 million users can be found on the Kazaa network at a time and over 700 million MP3 files available for exchange at any given time over this single network alone. (McLaughlin, 2003) Ethics of Free Music Downloads Before examining the arguments for and against the desirability of unrestricted music downloads on the Internet, it would be worthwhile to briefly look at the ethics behind the issue
Then came the data compression technology called MP3 in 1996, which made digital audio file transfer over the Internet possible and music piracy on the net took off in a big way. (Paradise 1999, p
Three Australian universities were charged with copyright infringement during the year and were ordered by a court to allow the record companies access to their files. (Pearce, 2003) ComCen, an Australian ISP was also sued for copyright infringement -- the first time an ISP was taken to court in Australia for allowing the use of its infrastructure to be used to trade files illegally
Therefore, people might feel that the customers don't get the fair rights when it comes to DRM solution but the truth of the matter is that in the past years the restrictions have been uplifted to a great extent mainly due to the increase in competition (Gee and Ivanova, 2006). Now customers have a lot more flexibility than they had in the past, for example, in 2003 when the iTunes was launched for the first time the people could listen to the songs that they purchased only on 3 computers and then by 2005 iTunes increased that number to 5 computers (Apple Press Release, 2003)
The artistic work is now recorded and then displayed in a way that it had never been done in the past and all this is due to the advancement in the technology. Now it is hardly a click's away for the users to not only download the songs of upcoming movies but to also watch their trailers and download them without the quality being affect at all and share all that media stuff with friends on the internet network in a matter of seconds, this kind of sharing had never been possible in the past (Gee and Ivanova, 2006)
Because of the availability of the copyrighted media on the internet they can now download individual songs rather than the complete albums and people can download these songs on their iPods and home computers etc. (Lipton, 2009)
However, at the moment most of the companies prefer using their own DRM systems and all these companies have their own particular pricing structures as, they use various different business models. Although the prices of the online content like movies and videos had decreased a lot due to the competition along with lesser number of restriction for the customers now (Pang, 2006)
Shared DRM system here means a system that is being shared by many content holders. According to Park and Scotchmer it is a lot better to use the shared DRM system for the following reasons (Park and Scotchmer, 2006): The cost of maintaining one shared DRM system will be a lot less than maintain an independent system
In time, copyrights laws or copyright protection have been extended to other tangible, original and creative woks and designs. To-date and based on the United States Copyright Act of 1976, the following are considered as falling under copyright protection (Radcliffe 2009): Literary works
Depending on the country where the copyright law is in place, the protection can be from several years to several decades. In the case of the United States Copyright Act of 1976, "the duration of the copyright for works created after January 1, 1978 is life of the author plus an additional 70 years as per 17 USC §302(a) as amended 1998 and current to November 2008 (Standler 2010)
Further, there was a provision in the Statute of Anne as to the number of years an author has legal rights to the publication of his or her works with provisions for renewal. The specific provisions in the Statute of Anne that changed the control of copyright from the Stationer's Company to the original authors are as follows (Tallmo 2006): Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment
However, every quotation must be clearly identified with the source of the quotation and the name of the author of the quoted text. (Templeton 2008)" Students who write various academic papers are familiar with this doctrine and know that they can quote from various sources provided they provide the proper citations and references
Understanding the Fundamental Issues Presented by the Cyber Medium A perfect example of the extent to which existing legal protections against unauthorized use and dissemination of intellectual property are the ongoing legal disputes between producers of intellectual property and entities such as Google, Megaupload, Youtube, and Hulu.com that enable Internet users to upload and store the intellectual property of movie and music producers (in particular) in formats that enable their widespread sharing, copying, and dissemination by countless individual consumers without any financial compensation to the producers of those intellectual properties (Bagley & Savage, 2005; Halbert & Ingulli, 2009)
Information Technology Copyright Issues There is no doubt that the digital revolution ushered forward by the computer and Internet age has changed myriad aspects of contemporary society. In addition to significant social and cultural changes and the evolution of political discourse on a global basis, the digital revolution has also profoundly changed the landscape of centuries of established legal principles that pertain to the proprietary ownership and protection of original intellectual property (Halbert & Ingulli, 2009)
Senate is currently considering proposed legislation to protect intellectual copyright owners from violations in connection with foreign entities, but even those measures deal principally with the unauthorized transfer of counterfeit media and not the type of problem facing intellectual property owners in connection with Megaupload and similar ventures (Sandoval, 2011). Just this week, a California federal appellate court issued a ruling against Perfect 10, a producer of adult entertainment media, upholding a trial court decision holding that Perfect 10 is not entitled to a preliminary injunction to stop Google from linking users to images from it's the Perfect 10 websites (Johnson, 2011)
The Case of Megaupload Perhaps the best illustration of the current dilemma faced by producers of valuable intellectual property is the situation involving the series of businesses under the umbrella of the Megaupload organization. Specifically, MegaPorn, MegaVideo, MegaLive, MegaPix, and Megaupload are websites created by Kim Schmitz, a former West German citizen who was previously convicted in Germany of computer hacking and insider stock trading a decade ago (Sandoval, 2011)
The Case of Megaupload Perhaps the best illustration of the current dilemma faced by producers of valuable intellectual property is the situation involving the series of businesses under the umbrella of the Megaupload organization. Specifically, MegaPorn, MegaVideo, MegaLive, MegaPix, and Megaupload are websites created by Kim Schmitz, a former West German citizen who was previously convicted in Germany of computer hacking and insider stock trading a decade ago (Sandoval, 2011)