“Article1, Section8, Clause8 of the constitution gives congress the power to make laws: to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited time to authors and inventors exclusive right to respective writings and discoveries” (U.S. Copyright Office). Formerly, claims were registered by clerks of U.S. district courts, however in today’s time the Copyright office is a separate department of the library of congress. The mission of the Copyright Office is to promote creativity by administering and sustaining an effective national copyright system and since 1870; the Copyright Office has registered more than 33,654,000 claims to copyright and mask works (U.S. Copyright Office). From Michael Angelo’s David to Michael
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Copyright Office”). Copyright infringement is predominately a civil matter meaning the owner has to pursue the issue in federal court (“10 Big Myths about Copyright”). As Copyright law is mostly civil laws a person is more likely to get sued than get sentenced to prison and what this means for powerful people with money is they can commit copyright infringement knowing they can pay it off should they get taken to court and there is no justice in this (“10 Big Myths about Copyright”). While it is true that not everyone participates in illegal downloading enough people do it to where it severely hurts the creator of the work. A very popular misconception about downloading or using someone’s work is that “It doesn 't hurt anybody” but this just isn’t true (“10 Big Myths about Copyright”). In essence using and passing off someone else’s work off as your own is plagiarism which is illegal. In the same way that printing more money diminishes the value of the dollar, illegally downloading music diminishes the value of the music causing CD sales to drop and making the artist suffer. Even with this knowledge people are still pirating movies and music, hacking photos, etc. A few years ago when the song blurred lines by Robin …show more content…
These people would be right except for the fact that the government has the influence to change this. Copyright laws are already in place prohibiting this records versus Napster case (“Real Business”). Napster was a popular peer-to-peer file sharing network that launched in 1999. It had an amazingly large fan-base of music lovers who shared mp3s. The court ruled against Napster and the company was forced to shut down the site after making a public apology and paying $26m in damages. The part that really sticks out as to how the copyright law wasn’t taken serious is the fact that Napster’s didn’t even try to reduce infringement, along with the fact that the company benefitted financially from it which inevitably is why they lost the case (“Real Business”). The most significant thing about the A&M versus Napster case is that this was “the first major case to address the application of copyright laws to peer-to-peer-file sharing” (“Real Business”). Now some people might say that the person always ends up paying so justice is served and they would be absolutely right, but the goal is to prevent the problem from happening and if justice is only served after the fact then the problem will keep recurring and it will never go away, which shows that copyright laws need to be enforced more in a way that cause people to take the serious and not want to commit
Copyright Office”). Copyright infringement is predominately a civil matter meaning the owner has to pursue the issue in federal court (“10 Big Myths about Copyright”). As Copyright law is mostly civil laws a person is more likely to get sued than get sentenced to prison and what this means for powerful people with money is they can commit copyright infringement knowing they can pay it off should they get taken to court and there is no justice in this (“10 Big Myths about Copyright”). While it is true that not everyone participates in illegal downloading enough people do it to where it severely hurts the creator of the work. A very popular misconception about downloading or using someone’s work is that “It doesn 't hurt anybody” but this just isn’t true (“10 Big Myths about Copyright”). In essence using and passing off someone else’s work off as your own is plagiarism which is illegal. In the same way that printing more money diminishes the value of the dollar, illegally downloading music diminishes the value of the music causing CD sales to drop and making the artist suffer. Even with this knowledge people are still pirating movies and music, hacking photos, etc. A few years ago when the song blurred lines by Robin …show more content…
These people would be right except for the fact that the government has the influence to change this. Copyright laws are already in place prohibiting this records versus Napster case (“Real Business”). Napster was a popular peer-to-peer file sharing network that launched in 1999. It had an amazingly large fan-base of music lovers who shared mp3s. The court ruled against Napster and the company was forced to shut down the site after making a public apology and paying $26m in damages. The part that really sticks out as to how the copyright law wasn’t taken serious is the fact that Napster’s didn’t even try to reduce infringement, along with the fact that the company benefitted financially from it which inevitably is why they lost the case (“Real Business”). The most significant thing about the A&M versus Napster case is that this was “the first major case to address the application of copyright laws to peer-to-peer-file sharing” (“Real Business”). Now some people might say that the person always ends up paying so justice is served and they would be absolutely right, but the goal is to prevent the problem from happening and if justice is only served after the fact then the problem will keep recurring and it will never go away, which shows that copyright laws need to be enforced more in a way that cause people to take the serious and not want to commit