Copyright and the Internet

Copyright came about in the fifteenth century in Britain, sometime after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. “The printing press represented a supreme threat to the clergy’s monopoly on idea dissemination; moveable type was the fifteenth century version of Napster” (Copyright Website). Copyright laws were instated to protect authors of various intellectual properties, (literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, architectural) and give credit to the proper author. Over the years copyright laws have changed dramatically, because of the development of the internet. Before the internet in order to be caught plagiarizing someone would have to read through all sorts of literary works, to know exactly where the information came from. These days a person can just type what they are looking for into search engine sites like “Google” and fine exactly what they were looking for. With information accessed with such ease it makes it almost effortless to plagiarize (the act of stealing others ideas, and passing them off as your own), other peoples work without the author having any idea. "The Internet has been characterized as the largest threat to copyright since its inception. The Internet is awash in information, a lot of it with varying degrees of copyright protection. Copyrighted works on the Net include news stories, software, novels, screenplays, graphics, pictures, Usenet messages and even email. In fact, the frightening reality is that almost everything on the Net is protected by copyright law. That can pose problems for the hapless surfer” (Copyright Website). The electronic environment does not change the ways we consider ownership, it does however change the ways in which we use and distribute intellectual propert...

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...ze. However the internet is also good in the sense that it can be used for advertisement and giving previews to different types of intellectual property. Internet copyright laws will always be different than regular copyright laws, because they must always be changing in order to keep up with the always changing technology. If you are placing any type of intellectual property on the internet you should register your work so that it is under more strict usage laws and so that you have say in how your work is used. No one wants to put hours of hard work into a creative work only to have someone else take these ideas and pass them off as their own work, this is the main and most important reason for copyright. Without copyright laws you might say the world would be quite a bit more chaotic.

Work Cited

Copyright Website http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/