Copyright law

Copyright law

Overview of Copyright

It may well seem that “new technological inventions such as the introduction of player pianos and perforated rolls of music in the 1910s and the introduction of radio in the 1920s have often led to changes” in order to tackle infringement of copyright law. “Copyright protection has grown over the centuries, from the term-implied right to control the copying of literary work to the right to control the internet transmission of digital recordings of all sorts of literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic materials”. Peer to Peer is the most recent area which copyright law was required to challenge. This text provides a brief statement of what is copyright law based on the United Kingdom legislation which is similar to the whole world and its relationship with internet law, examines how the copyright law has respond to the challenges of technological development with reference to the old and recent case law in US and Europe; and evaluate the way which copyright law has responded in this issue.

Patents and copyrights are the two forms of intellectual property that provide protection to the programs and software of the computers. The copyright laws that provide protection to the original expression that is not in favour of directly copying and not generating a new idea themselves. The major purpose of copyrights is that it provides protection to the original work of expressions, which includes, poems, novels, plays, composition of music, films, sculpture, photographs and computer programs by preventing the people to commercially exploit it without the permission of the copyright's owner. A program or a work is only eligible for copyright protection only if it can fulfil the basic criteria for the originality and it is a fixed medium of expression that is tangible in nature. The originality is not related to the novelty. Therefore, a work can be original even if it is resembles closely to the other works and mostly importantly, when it is not the result of copying.

Copyrights are divided in to two kinds, (1) moral and (2) economic rights. Economic rights are the rights of public performance broadcasting, adaptation, translation, public display, distribution, public recitation, etc. Moral rights are rights that are concerned with the protection of the integrity of the authors' reputation and work. Software is widely accepted in all the countries around the globe that both the source code (human readable form) and code of objects (machine readable form) qualify for the protection of copyright.

The complex interactions of software licensing and intellectual property prove daunting hurdles for many individuals and businesses looking to open source software solutions. The financial reproductions for misusing a piece of open source software are high, and require great attention. Many resources are required to determine a software packages copyright holders and licensing information. The cost of such an analysis may become too costly to justify the use of the open source solution. The existing tools for analysing software projects licenses and copyrights are lacking, and much hand vetting is ...