On Copy Rights and Sharing

On Copyrights and Sharing

As the internet becoming more and more popular and powerful, information, files, data and all sorts of digital works flow freely online, it could be easily accessed, shared and reproduced. Blogging about their opinion, uploading their own pictures to their online albums, reposting something they saw on facebook, downloading movies and songs are just as easy and common among internet users nowadays. But while we’re using the materials on the internet, how do we know if we’re violating copyrights? As a (请客户在这里加入自己的介绍 ?? Student from?? university), I use the internet on a daily basis, not only reading news and information, but also look up some useful materials as an aid to my studies. This is what I learned about copyrights, and my opinion upon sharing online.

What is copyright? According to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, copyright in the simplest term means “the right to copy”. In general, only the copyright owner, often the creator of the work, is allowed to produce or reproduce the work or to permit anyone else to do so. Given this explanation, many people would assume that internet is a public domain, so unlike printed items, things published online are not protected. But this is not true; nowadays almost all nations follow the Berne copyright convention, which everything created privately and originally is copyrighted and protected, and it doesn’t need to have a copyright notice on it, including all digital contents, software programs, dramatic, musical, artistic and literary works.

However, with the advance information technology and the copyright laws evolve, new forms of online content usage are introduced. For example, some people recorded the news on their television and made their own comments, and then they upload it online to share it with the public, does that violate copyrights? Since the copyrights of the news coverage belongs to the news channel? The fair dealing (or fair use in the US) exemption to...