Copyright laws have grown to become a very prominent issue in this country. As the number of developers, artists, and other cretaors increases, the more subjects we have available to compare to other objects, the higher chances there are that two of said objects will be considered similar enough that one of the, or even perhaps both parties involved will feel cheated by the other, giving context on the increasing amount of copyright laws and trials. The cases of Sony 's Betamax and Grokster 's StreamCast are two examples of this phenomenon that display the two ways in which this trial can end, and serves to help identify what exactly copyright is, who is guily of it, and who is innocent. Starting off, we have the Sony vs Universal case, otherwise
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To make the process even more difficult, newer technologies make it even harder for them to rule as there are not cases like this they can look back on to base a ruling on. For example, video game copyrights have been a growing issue, and not just in devlopment. Simply playing a game, recording your gameplay of it, and uploading it can be considered to by infringment and the content can be forcibly taken down. A popular youtube channel known as Gametheory created a video about copyright cases from both early and recent in the video game industry. He goes on to show two sets of games, Asteroids and Meteors, and Steet Fighter and Fighters History. In both cases, the court admited that the second game was a blatent copy of the first that was trying to make a profit of the former games success, but neither had commited infringment, as all they copied was the concept and you cannot have exclusive rights over a concept (such as shooting rocks in space, or martial artists fighting in a street). However, another case that was far more recent went back on this, as they decided to determine whether two mobile games were the same based on what video game bloggers thought and ruled that one had infringed on another despite that going against their earlier ruling. The point being here that with these newer technologies that are unconvential and new to the ways of law, the court has to almost make up the rules as it goes along,trying to adapt to this quickly adapting environment and as a result it is very easy for two extremely similar cases to be ruled
To make the process even more difficult, newer technologies make it even harder for them to rule as there are not cases like this they can look back on to base a ruling on. For example, video game copyrights have been a growing issue, and not just in devlopment. Simply playing a game, recording your gameplay of it, and uploading it can be considered to by infringment and the content can be forcibly taken down. A popular youtube channel known as Gametheory created a video about copyright cases from both early and recent in the video game industry. He goes on to show two sets of games, Asteroids and Meteors, and Steet Fighter and Fighters History. In both cases, the court admited that the second game was a blatent copy of the first that was trying to make a profit of the former games success, but neither had commited infringment, as all they copied was the concept and you cannot have exclusive rights over a concept (such as shooting rocks in space, or martial artists fighting in a street). However, another case that was far more recent went back on this, as they decided to determine whether two mobile games were the same based on what video game bloggers thought and ruled that one had infringed on another despite that going against their earlier ruling. The point being here that with these newer technologies that are unconvential and new to the ways of law, the court has to almost make up the rules as it goes along,trying to adapt to this quickly adapting environment and as a result it is very easy for two extremely similar cases to be ruled