Copyright And Internet
University of Maryland University College
Graduate School of Management and Technology
A Student Research Report
For
IMAT 670: Contemporary Topics in Informatics
Copyright and the Internet
Warui Denis Gichuri
11/19/08
Table of Contents
Copyrights on the Internet 3
What is a Copyright? 4
Internet 5
Copyright Law 6
Ethical Rights 9
Government Intervention 9
Knowledge Domination 13
Issues of Copyright in Internet 15
2. Fair Use 16
3. Principle of Balance 16
4. Transmission 17
References 18
Copyrights on the Internet
Introduction
In the 21st century the internet is looked at as a source with vast amounts of information, entertainment and communication that is accessible to everyone with a workstation. Millions of people all over the world believed that anything found on the internet goes. I believed that myself, but that was until I did some research and learned about it. That’s when I found out that I was very wrong. Sometimes a user’s quest for knowledge and entertainment is done over the internet. Internet users unintentionally break copyright laws which govern the internet due to lack of proper knowledge (Skvarka, 1996).
Many myths have misled users all over the world to believe that copyright laws do not apply on the internet due to the fact that the internet is unregulated. This is a common mistake made by most users, they believe that if any work doesn’t have a copyright notice then it isn’t copyrighted (Skvarka, 1996). The correct form of a copyright notice is "Copyright or © (date) by (author/owner)" (Skvarka, 1996).
Users all over the world believe that if this notice isn’t displayed on an article, webpage or whatever they find on the internet then they can post, use or take any work for their own personal use and make it their own. Sadly, this is stealing because the idea, article or post wasn’t yours. Since April 1989,...
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