Week 1: Clear/ Copyright

Although there is a fine line between what is legal and illegal regarding copyright laws, it is often not black and white for the average person. Before this lesson, I had a hard time differentiating between the laws myself. Users need to be careful using material directly from the World Wide Web since most is copyrighted, meaning that someone owns the form that the idea takes. To use this material the user must be the copyright owner or the owner must give the user permission to use their material or the material must be in the public domain.

Copyright can come in all shapes and sizes. Books, plays, music, dance, movies and pictures can all be copyrighted. These copyrighted materials can be owned for a lifetime, plus 70 years. For companies, it is over 100 years. Copyright is very important to the competitive business world. So many forms of ideas are being created to make each company stronger than its competitor. Copyright is very handy in the sense that it protects those forms of ideas, helping each company stand out to consumers.

This Web site lists different examples of copyright infringement: http://lawvibe.com/top-10-copyright-law-scandals-that-rocked-the-world-in-2009/. Example 1 discusses how Napster was shut down due to copyright issues. Copyright is still controversial among many people and companies. This article shows how people need to abide by certain conditions in order to use copyrighted material and to be extremely careful using ideas from the Web.