Copy Right Laws

Final Learning Team Paper

Willie Hicks

COM440

1/16/16

Billy Strickland

Final Learning Team Paper

Introduction

This paper introduces several important concepts of copyright law and discusses their significance. Creators are under the continuous challenge of guarding and monitoring the rights to their works against the onslaught of advancing technologies. New technologies have made works of writing ever more accessible to the public while at the same time facilitating the unapproved coping and distribution of their works.

In today’s society it becomes very easy to violate copyright laws without even realizing a person has done it. The internet with the information that is so easily shared makes this task less difficult than it should be. Also with travel people are able to distribute information in areas where they may not have been able to in years past. Copyrights are the rights of authors or creators over their literary and artistic work. Music, books, and computer applications, can be a few forms of copy written material. Copyright is a part of what is referred to as intellectual property. Other parts of intellectual property may be patents, which have a time limit, or trademarks. Trademarks are often used by companies with branding their name. With copy written material reports of violation has been quite controversial in more recent years.

The idea of the internet and file sharing really has played into violating of copy written material. While most students and people are able to recognize that taking someone’s work without paying for it can be a form of stealing, there are still others that encourage file sharing and the idea that information should be freely distributed. People are able to download movies, music, and books off the internet when they have not paid the respected publishers or artists their dues. In essence this can be considered a form of stealing, but file sharers may argue that the quality is not the same, and...