Copyright On Internet - A Tricky Pickle To Deal With
The internet has fortunately been a hub for creative minds to come together and get their work noticed. People from various fields like literature, music, visual art, science, business come up with their respective unique work and the World Wide Web is so far a good host. Pardon the cliché, but every coin has two sides. Along with the benefits of a universal platform the internet provides, it also comes along with foul ideas in other people who wish believe that plagiarism is "ok".
Imagine being a talented artist, who writes excellent poetry and is also a blogger. The poem ends up in your blog, and you go to sleep happy. The next day, you are shocked to see that Google shows your poem on someone else's blog or site and you have no clue about it. This is copyright violation, which means someone else is out there who is passing off your work as his. Thankfully, there are laws these days which respect intellectual property rights - and specialized intellectual property lawyers that can assist you in getting justice. Although it sounds very difficult, but Copyright Laws exist extensively online these days and are always looking out for ways to prevent plagiarism related malpractices by prosecuting the violators.
Now we also need to draw clear lines between Copyright violation on the internet and online piracy. The first one is basically infringement of IPR (intellectual property rights) when someone passes of someone else's work as their own or uses it for their own purposes without proper authorization. Online Piracy is mainly the replication and distribution of an already existing online file or document. Thinkers and experts from various walks of life have different views on copyright too. The laws differ geographically as well.
A band which releases an album, and lets its free distribution to take place from its website retains the right to its work. So in this case downloading that album free off the net would be legal, but reposting it online saying it's someone else's work would be copyright violation and justifiably, punishable. Agencies Creative Commons and tools like Copyscape, help check copyright violations and are frequently used by various lobbies looking for unique work. So in retrospect, we can say that just like the real world, the online one too has the custom of respecting one's right to ownership of one's own work, and this can be bought or sold as well.
The internet is a hub of data, information, music, literature, ideas and expressions. It's good that all of us have access to these unique materials but let us not forget that all of these is also the result of the hard work of various people. A scientist putting up a research paper online patenting his work, or a writer blogging his short story on a site, a musician posting his music online for reviews - all are owners of their own work. Let's not forget this, just because they agreed to share it with us online.
