Internet Piracy: Theft of Intellectual Property Essay -- Copyright Vio

Piracy is a form of theft. Specifically, it refers to the unauthorized copying or use of gifted property. Intellectual property is knowledge or expression that is owned by someone. There are three major types of intellectual property 1) creative plant, including music, compose material, plastic films, and software, which are protected by copyright law 2) inventions, which are protected by patent law and 3) brand-name products, which are protected by trademarks. Many of the issues contact piracy have to do with the difference between intellectual property and somatogenetic property. A CD, for example, is a piece of physical property, but the songs on the CD are intellectual property. A customer in a record store can purchase a CD, but someone else still owns, or more precisely, has the copyright to the songs on the CD. Piracy is primarily a problem for the entertainment and software industries, and therefore piracy most often involves violations of copyright law. right of first publication is a legal right that protects creative works from being reproduced, performed, or disseminated without permission of the copyright owner. Essentially, a copyright gives its owner the exclusive right to diagnose copies of the material in question. Physical piracy-the copying and illegal sale of hard-copy CDs, videotapes, and DVDs-costs the music industry over $4 billion a year worldwide and the movie industry more than $3.5 billion. These numbers do not factor in the growing (and difficult to measure) problem of Internet piracy, in which music and movies are transferred to digital format and copies are made of the resulting computer file. Journalist Charles C. Mann explains why Internet piracy has the potential to be vastly more damaging to copyright industr... ...ples physical property, there is clearly a social benefit from the wide dissemination of intellectual propertyi.e., ideas and their expressions.In Naughtons view, online file sharing does not qualify as pirac y at all We have to remind legislators that intellectual property rights are a socially-conferred privilege rather than an inalienable right, that copying is not eer evil (and in some cases is actually socially beneficial) and that there is a huge difference between wholesale piracythe mass-production and sale of illegal copies of protected worksand the filesharing that most internet users go in for.Although online file sharing debuted in 1999, lawmakers and copyright industries are just beginning to address the myriad questions the practice has generated. In At Issue Internet Piracy, authors attempt to answer some of those questions.