As software industries continue to grow and become multi-billion dollar companies, some of the unethical entrepreneurs take it upon themselves to distribute pirated software to make money. According to Operation Fast Link, which is the largest program to take action against pirates, it has confiscated more than $50 million worth of pirated media from these "entrepreneurs" from 2004-2006. It is against the law to copy copyrighted software without the permission of the copyholder, even if you aren't making profit off of it. The only exception is if copies are made for educational purposes, which falls under the United States fair use laws.
Under current U.S. law, fair use allows for the reproduction of a particular work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. There are four factors specified in the copyright act that must be met when claiming fair use:
1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
2. The nature of the copyrighted work.
3. Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
It is of course not applicable to the illegal production and selling of copyrighted software. The problem is determining whether or not it is fair use or not, of course it's not if it is being sold for profit but what about when it isn't? For instance, is Pinterest violating copyright laws by allowing users to pin images to their page? It seems to some people that they are in violation of copyright laws. In their terms of service, Pinterest points copyright violations to the users. Although fair use laws allow for low resolution thumbnail photos to be used for education and satire but a lot of users use high resolution images for their boards. If Pinterest is challenged, they could avoid liability by pointing lawyers to the user who posted the content.
Source: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/copyright/copyright101
Check out this video...Fair Use and a whole lot more......
Check out this video...Fair Use and a whole lot more......
Next time: Can piracy be stopped?
I think that this was a great post. The video was very enlightening. I was not aware how YouTube went about checking videos for copyright infringement. I think it's odd though how many videos you can find that do, in fact, use copyrighted material without permission of the copy holder, and do not get taken down. This seems to be especially prevalent in the music video genre. You can find probably hundreds of different "lyric" videos for songs that are fan made and in the description, the uploader will have the text "no copyright infringement intended." I feel like that doesn't exactly count as documentation for fair use, so if that is indeed the case, then why did those videos make it up, and why do they not get taken down? If you want an example, you can just look up any song that's on the radio now on YouTube, and I'm sure you'll find many different videos, and at most 1 or 2 will be from Vevo or whatever real publisher the artists have. Thanks for the post - makes you think.
ReplyDelete