Copyright Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Copyright Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Copyright prohibits people from copying a wide range of works—music, books, movies photographs, computer code, and so on—without prior permission. By putting restrictions on use, copyright attempts to provide content creators with financial compensation in an effort to ensure they have an incentive and the means to continue creating work in the future. It also helps prompt investment in their works.

Copyright legislation creates intellectual property, which recognizes works as the expression of ideas; it is the physical manifestation that is protected through legislation—not the ideas themselves. The history of copyright is long and has been turbulent at times. The first copyright legislation was the United Kingdom’s Statute of Anne passed in 1709, which gave authors control over the use of their work and took some power away from publishers.

International Copyright

Understanding copyright law is complicated as it varies from country to country. However, an international legal system exists to tackle disputes arising from differences in national legislation. International cooperation has been ongoing for more than two hundred years, starting, most notably, with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1886. Today, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is tasked with administering international copyright agreements States belonging to the European Union are also subject to copyright regulations at the European level.

Two distinct attitudes toward copyright have emerged and are very much reflected in the evolution of legislation in different countries. On one hand, there is the view that once a work is made available for public consumption, people should have a certain freedom to use it as they please. According to this line of argument, copyright owners should receive only limited control over—and compensation for—use of their work. This view tends to underpin American and British attitudes and legislation toward copyright. On the other hand, there is the view that favors the natural, or moral, right of those who created a work to receive compensation for its every use, and such an attitude is often reflected in European legislation.

New Challenges

While it was technological advancement that brought copyright into being, such advancements led to great challenges for owners of copyright. With technology like the printing press and the photocopier, exact copies of works could be reproduced relatively easily. Today, the Internet facilitates the ease of copying, lowering costs and making the process faster. As a result, the unauthorized copying of many works—or piracy—has been on the rise.

In spite of the challenges raised by technology and the concerns of copyright owners over piracy and loss of revenue, technological advancements have also contributed to ease when it comes to the management of copyright. Programs that allow for the legal downloading and purchasing of music not only make work easier to distribute, but also help to ensure that compensation is received when work is accessed. Growing attention has been paid to the development of digital rights management (DRM) strategies because many copyright owners look toward encryption as a means of protecting their work.

The protection of digital work has not been without controversy and complication. Critics claim that some DRM strategies undermine privacy and in some cases even compromise our personal property, as Sony BMG found out when its CDs were found to make computers vulnerable to viruses. DRM has also been frowned upon as it clashes with the fair use doctrine built into the copyright system that allows copyrighted material to be used for specific purposes such as teaching.

The challenges posed by new media prompted copyright owners to call for changes to copyright legislation, and WIPO responded with two Internet treaties in 1996: the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Individual countries followed with legislative change to implement the measures outlined in the treaties. The United States, for example, passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. As technology continues to evolve, we can anticipate further changes to ensure a balance among the rights of copyright owners, creators, and consumers.

Bibliography:

Gillespie, Tarleton. “Designed to ‘Effectively Frustrate’: Copyright, Technology and the Agency of Users.” New Media and Society, 8, no. 4 (2006): 651–669.
Goldstein, Paul. Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Gurnsey, John. Copyright Theft. London: Aslib Gower, 1995.
Kretschmer, Martin. “Trends in Global Copyright.” Global Media and Communication 1, no. 2 (2005): 231–237.
Litman, Jessica. Digital Copyright. New York: Prometheus Books, 2001.