Facts to Be Aware of Regarding Internet Copyright Infringement

Copyright infringement happens when one party uses, sells, distributes, or recreates another person's work of authorship without the original owner's consent. Copyright infringement can happen in a variety of ways, through many mediums, including motion pictures, photographs, paintings, musical recordings, and literary works.

With the emergence of the internet, copyright infringement laws began to expand in an effort to adapt laws to meet the growth of technology. The internet is a tool that allows the easy retrieval of information instantaneously. This makes it easy for information to spread quickly, though much of this information can be copyrighted. To prevent this from happening, new intellectual property laws have been established to protect creative works that are being spread without consent quickly and easily over the internet.

Internet Copyright Infringement for Works on Websites

Websites are a great tool to help spread information and show off creative works to millions of people quickly and easily. Many people show off artwork, photography and writing on various websites and blogs. If a person owns his or her own website, the information that is placed on it is generally protected under current copyright laws.

Since information flows quickly across the internet and there is such a vast amount of it, it is quite often difficult to tell if when a person passes off creative work as his or her own when it is not. When displaying copyrighted work, authors are told to take extreme caution.

One way to prevent this from happening is to have photographs watermarked with a ©. There are also ways to digitally sign content so that the source of it is easily determined if an internet copyright infringement case goes to court. Overall, it is important for authors to understand that although the internet is a useful tool for showing work, anything put on it is subject to copyright infringement. Authors should always use caution.

Internet Copyright Infringement on Musical Works

As technology advanced further, programmers were able to find a way to compress high quality audio into small files. Also, with the emergence of the internet came the ease of file sharing. It was not long before copyrighted musical work began to spread quickly throughout the internet without artists receiving royalties.

This internet copyright infringement became a major dispute with record companies and individuals that stole music from internet servers across the world. New guidelines and procedures were put in place to protect intellectual property, though it is still a major concern today due to the evolving nature of the internet.

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