Canada’s copyright law is one of our hardest laws to enforce. The reason the police have so much trouble enforcing this law, is due to technology. This law is very easy to break, and once broken, it is very hard to track down violators. So although some form of a copyright law is needed, the one we have has, too many holes to be effective. There are three main ways in which the copyright law is broken in everyday life. They is audio / video tape copying, plagiarism, and software piracy.
The first, and most commonly violated aspect of the copyright law, is the copying of audio tracks for oneself and friends. Thanks to the invention of CD burners, this has become very easy. You simply take the song, and burn it onto a blank CD. You also just broke the law. Along with copying song, now we can copy video tapes almost as easily. If you hook two VCR’s together, they can copy from one to the other.
You could rent a movie form the video store, copy and return it, with no one the wiser. The problem with copying videos and songs is that for every copy you make the recording artist, the actors, producers and everyone else who collect royalties from them lose money. If the companies start to lose money, they raise prices. Thus a vicious circle begins. As prices go up, fewer people buy original copies. If less people buy the original Cds or videos prices will once again rise.
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Another major form of piracy is plagiarism. The stealing of someone elses ideas or work. The biggest category of people who fall into here are students. Very often a student when doing a research paper will “accidently” forget to footnote his work. By “forgetting” to give the author credit, the student has claimed the work as his own. Another reason students may copy someone else’s work is to sound more sophisticated hoping that if they use someone elses words it will sound better than their own.
Generally, this provides an easy way for a teacher or the police to catch them. Teachers also plagiarize rather frequently. Very often a teacher will photocopy several pages from a book, in order to save the students the expense of having to buy the book for themselves. While this is a noble act by the teacher, in most cases, this is illegal. Unless the author of the book, gave consent for his / her work to be freely distributed, teachers can’t copy it anymore than students or anyone else can.
The third category of piracy is Software Pirating. There are several forms which this can take. The most common form is very similar to Cds or DVDs. It is when someone copies a game or program from his / her computer to someone elses. Another form of Computer Piracy is a “Hacker.” A hacker is someone who has an in-depth knowledge of computers and programming. He can then remove the “bug” that prevents programs from being copied.
After he removes the bug he’s able to distribute the software at his own discretion. This is in direct conflict with the copyright law, because the program was not meant to be copied thus the bug. It therefore becomes illegal to remove the bug. Like CD and DVD copying, computer games causes people to lose money. In this case, instead of it being the singer, or actors, it is the programmer, and the software companies who lose.
This leads to the same vicious circle. More copies make higher prices etc… The copyright law is hard to enforce likewise so are the penalties. If you are found in violation of breaking the copyright laws, you probably will only have to pay a fine. However, the fines can be quite substantial and depending where you are in the distribution chain (how many copies were made before yours) the fine varies, with whoever copied the original paying the most. In extreme cases, where a contract is enacted upon the purchase of the original copy like with Word Perfect, a computer word processor.
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Upon buying an original set off disks you must sign a contract promising not to distribute the program. In these cases, you could face imprisonment because now not only are you dealing with breach of the copyright law, but with a breach of contract as well. So the moral of the story is enjoy your large collection of Cds and DVDs. Get those good marks on essays you didn’t even write. Enjoy those really fun computer games, because under Canada’s current copyright law and the amount of attention the police pay to this problem, it is very unlikely that you will ever get caught.
