The copyright infringement Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works covered by copyright law, in a way that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works of software Computer software, or just software, is the collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions telling a computer what to do. The term was coined to contrast to the old term hardware . In contrast to hardware, software is intangible, meaning it "cannot be touched". Software is also sometimes used in a more (often referred to as software piracy) refers to several practices which involve the unauthorized copying of computer software. Copyright infringement of this kind is extremely common. Most countries have copyright laws which apply to software, but the degree of enforcement varies. After a dispute over WTO membership The World Trade Organization is an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade. The organization officially commenced on January 1, 1995 under the Marrakech Agreement, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which commenced in 1948. The organization deals with regulation of trade between between Iran Iran (Persian: ایران [ʔiˈɾɒn] ), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country in Central Eurasia and Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was also known to the western world as Persia. Both Persia and Iran are used and USA ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language led to the legalization in Iran of the unconstrained distribution of software (see Iran and copyright issues According to Circular 38a of the U.S. Copyright Office, Iran has no official copyright relations whatsoever with the United States), there have been fears[who?][citation needed] that world governments might use copyright politically.
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Existing and proposed laws
Main articles: Copyright infringement Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works covered by copyright law, in a way that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works and History of copyright law The Statute of Anne, long title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned", is now seen as the origin of copyright law Demonstration in Sweden Sweden (pronounced /ˈswiːdən/ SWEE-dən, Swedish: Sverige pronounced [ˈsveːrijə] ( listen)), officially the Kingdom of Sweden (Swedish: Konungariket Sverige (help·info)), is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden has land borders with Norway to the west and Finland to the northeast, and water borders with in support of software piracy, 2006 2006 was a common year that started on a Sunday. In the Gregorian calendar, it was the 2006th year of the Common Era, or of Anno Domini; the 6th year of the 3rd millennium and of the 21st century; and the 7th of the 2000s decade.In most developing coutries, the term of a copyright never exceeds any useful life a program may have.[citation needed] The oldest legacy computer systems used today 2007 was a common year that started on a Monday. In the Gregorian calendar, it was the 2007th year of the Common Era, or of Anno Domini; the 7th year of the 3rd millennium and of the 21st century; and the 8th of the 2000s decade are still less than 40 years old. The copyright on them will not expire in the United States and Europe until about 2030. Changes, operating systems, network environments and user expectations usually make programs obsolete much faster than in 70 years (the current copyright length).
Under the proposed US Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), a controversial model law The Model Penal Code, which seeks to harmonize state criminal law statutes, is in effect a uniform act but it was developed by the American Law Institute and not the NCCUSL that has been adopted in Virginia The area's history begins with several indigenous groups, including the Powhatan. In 1607 the London Company established the Colony of Virginia as the first permanent New World English colony. Land from displaced Native American tribes and slave labor each played a significant role in the colony's early politics and plantation economy. Virginia and Maryland Maryland is a major center for life sciences research and development. With more than 350 biotechnology companies located there, Maryland is the third-largest nexus in this field in the United States, software manufacturers are granted broad rights to shut down unauthorized software copiers without court intervention similar to some of the provisions found in Title II of the US ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language DMCA The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to, the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act The Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act is United States federal law that creates a conditional safe harbor for online service providers (OSPs, including Internet service providers) and other Internet intermediaries by shielding them from liability for the infringing acts of others. OCILLA was passed as a part of the 1998, which allows copyright holders to demand that an online service provider An online service provider can for example be an internet service provider, email provider, news provider , entertainment provider (music, movies), e-shopping site (online stores), e-finance or e-banking site, e-health site, e-government site, Wikipedia, Usenet (commonly accessed through Google Groups).[clarification needed] In its original more (OSP) expeditiously block access to infringing materials. If the OSP complies, it is granted a safe harbor The term safe harbor has several special usages, in an analogy with its literal meaning, that of a harbor or haven which provides safety from weather or attack, providing it immunity from infringement claims. If it doesn't comply, it doesn't become liable, but may instead rely on the protection of the Communications Decency Act The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was the first notable attempt by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In 1997, in the landmark cyberlaw case of Reno v. ACLU, the U.S. Supreme Court partially overturned the law.
Title I of the US ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language DMCA The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to, the The articles in English include the definite article the and the indefinite articles a and an WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act The WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act, is a part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act , a 1998 U.S. law. It has two major portions, Section 102, which implements the requirements of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and Section 103, which arguably provides additional protection against the circumvention of copy has provisions that prevent persons from "circumvent[ing] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work". Thus if a software manufacturer has some kind of software, dongle or password access device installed in the software any attempt to bypass such a copy protection Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy obstruction, copy prevention and copy restriction, is a technology for preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media scheme may be actionable In the law, a cause of action is a set of facts sufficient to justify a right to sue to obtain money, property, or the enforcement of a right against another party. The phrase may refer to the legal theory upon which a plaintiff brings suit (such as breach of contract, battery, or false imprisonment). The legal document which carries a claim is — though the US Copyright Office is currently reviewing anticircumvention rulemaking under DMCA — anticircumvention exemptions that have been in place under the DMCA include those in software designed to filter websites that are generally seen to be inefficient (child safety and public library website filtering software) and the circumvention of copy protection mechanisms that have malfunctioned, have caused the software to become inoperable or which are no longer supported by their manufacturers.
Most commercially exploited proprietary software is developed in the United States ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language and Europe Europe is one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus region (Specification of borders) and the Black Sea to the southeast. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean and, hence for those located in economically disadvantaged economies it can be prohibitively expensive to pay for all the end user licenses for those products rather than to purchase just one license and then copy the software without paying any additional licensing fees. Some critics in the developing countries of the world see this as an indirect technology transfer tax on their country preventing technological advancement and they use this type of argument when refusing to accept the copyright laws that are in force in most technologically advanced countries. This idea is often applied to patent A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state (national government) to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a public disclosure of an invention laws as well.
Notable Exceptions
France distanced itself from other Copyright enforcers by issuing a ruling that entitled bank secrecy Bank secrecy is a legal principle under which banks are allowed to protect personal information about their customers, through the use of numbered bank accounts or otherwise. Effective bank secrecy is better achieved in certain countries, such as Switzerland or in tax havens, where offshore banks adhere to voluntary or statutory levels of privacy to infringe Copyright. Under the ruling issued by the General Prosecutor of Paris, bank FINAMA (100% held by French insurer GROUPAMA) was able to scupper a $200 million software piracy trial by just invoking bank secrecy Bank secrecy is a legal principle under which banks are allowed to protect personal information about their customers, through the use of numbered bank accounts or otherwise. Effective bank secrecy is better achieved in certain countries, such as Switzerland or in tax havens, where offshore banks adhere to voluntary or statutory levels of privacy [1].
The effects of copyright infringement on digital culture
Peer to peer A peer-to-peer, commonly abbreviated to P2P, is any distributed network architecture composed of participants that make a portion of their resources directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination instances (such as servers or stable hosts). Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in (P2P) file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multi-media , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of storage, transmission, and distribution models and common methods of file sharing incorporate manual sharing using removable media, technologies have lowered the threshold of knowledge needed to acquire massive amounts of information. Large networks have been created which are dedicated to share knowledge, but these same networks can be used to infringe copyright. Identifying infringing use can be difficult, since the users can modify the name and content of material being shared.
Rise of quality in free alternative software also helps to lower the use of copied software worldwide. Illegally copying software is seen by some software producers as a "lesser evil" than actually buying or illegally copying a competitor's software. Jeff Raikes, a Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8 executive, stated that "If they're going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else." He also added [2] that "We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software."
Traian Băsescu Traian Băsescu is a Romanian politician and former Merchant Navy officer. He is the current President of Romania, after winning the office in the 2004 presidential election, and being inaugurated on December 20, 2004. Prior to becoming President, he was the Mayor of Bucharest from June 2000 until December 2004, the president of Romania Romania (pronounced /roʊˈmeɪniə/ roe-MAY-nee-ə; dated: Rumania; Romanian: România [romɨˈni.a] ( listen)) is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, north of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. Almost all of the Danube Delta is located, stated that "piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania."[3]
Microsoft admits that piracy of its Windows operating system has helped give it huge market share in China that will boost its revenues when these users "go legit." Bill Gates said, "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux Linux refers to the family of Unix-like computer operating systems using the Linux kernel. Linux can be installed on a wide variety of computer hardware, ranging from mobile phones, tablet computers and video game consoles, to mainframes and supercomputers. Linux is predominantly known for its use in servers; in 2009 it held a server market share when there's piracy than when there's not."[4] He has also said in reference to China:
As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. —Bill Gates William Henry "Bill" Gates III, KBE is an American business magnate, philanthropist, author and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. He is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third. During his career[5]
See also
- Abandonware Abandonware is a term used to describe primarily computer software, but more recently also physical devices that are discontinued products and for which no product support is available, or whose copyright ownership may be unclear for various reasons. While the term has been applied largely to older games, other classes of software or equipment (
- Australian copyright law Australian copyright law governs the legally enforceable rights to creative and artistic works under the laws of the Australian Commonwealth. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 is the national copyright legislation which defines the scope of copyright in Australia. Designs may be covered by the Copyright Act (as sculptures or drawings) as well as
- Computer Associates Int. Inc. v. Altai Inc. Computer Associates created a job scheduling program called CA-SCHEDULER which sorts, runs, and controls the various tasks given to a computer. This scheduler was designed to be compatible with IBM System 370 computers which ran one of three different operating systems: DOS/VSE, MVS, and VM/CMS. Traditionally, a program must be specifically
- Copyleft Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work. In other words, copyleft is a general method for making a program free, and requiring all modified and
- Dongle A dongle is a small piece of hardware that connects to a laptop or desktop computer for the purpose of copy protection or authentication of software to be used on that system
- Federation Against Software Theft The Federation Against Software Theft is a not-for-profit organisation, formed in 1984 with the aim of eliminating copyright infringement of software in the UK. FAST was the world's first Anti-piracy organisation to work to protect the copyrights of software publishers. Initially concentrating on lobbying parliament to revise Copyright law, FAST
- File sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multi-media , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of storage, transmission, and distribution models and common methods of file sharing incorporate manual sharing using removable media,
- iLok Smart Key
- Matrix Software License Protection System
- Organized crime Organized crime or criminal organizations is a transnational grouping of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity, most commonly for the purpose of generating a monetary profit. The Organized Crime Control Act defines organized crime as "The unlawful activities of [...] a highly organized,
- Product activation Product activation is a license validation procedure required by some proprietary computer software programs. Specifically, product activation refers to a method patented by Uniloc where a software application hashes hardware serial numbers and an ID number specific to the product's license to generate a unique installation ID. This installation
- Software copyright Software copyright, the relatively recent extension of copyright law to machine-readable software. It is used by proprietary software companies to prevent the unauthorized copying of their software. It is also used by proponents of open source software to encourage the disclosure of improvements to source code
- Warez Warez refers primarily to copyrighted works traded in violation of copyright law. The term generally refers to illegal releases by organized groups, as opposed to file sharing between friends or large groups of people with similar interest using a darknet. It usually does not refer to commercial for-profit software counterfeiting. This term was
- Windows Genuine Advantage Windows Genuine Advantage is an anti-piracy system created by Microsoft that enforces online validation of the licensing of several recent Microsoft Windows operating systems when accessing several services, such as Windows Update, and downloading Windows components from the Microsoft Download Center[citation needed]. WGA consists of two
References
- International Journal of Research in Marketing, December 2003 (Volume 20, No. 4), "How many pirates should a software firm tolerate?"
- Journal of Business, 2004, (Volume 77, No. 2),“Software Piracy: Market penetration in the Presence of Network Externalities”
- Albacea, E., Payongayong M. T. and A. Pinpin (2005) Computer Ethics.UPOU Los Baños Philippines. p 78.
- G.Frederick, (2007) Software Piracy: Some Facts, Figures, and Issues.
- ^ "GROUPAMA cooking evidences to shut-down massive Piracy case". TWD Industries AG. http://www.remoteanything.com/archives/GROUPAMA.pdf.
- ^ http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/03/12/microsoft-executive-pirating-software-choose-microsoft
- ^ Nathan Davis. Thanks for letting us pirate. 5 February 2007.
- ^ The Economist, Piracy: Look for the Silver Lining (July 19th-25th, 2008 ed.), pp. 23
- ^ "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish". CNET. July 2, 1998. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-212942.html.
External links
- The "Software Piracy" Controversy by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)
Further reading
- Siva Vaidhyanathan. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York University Press, 2001. 243 pages. ISBN 0-8147-8806-8
- Claus Pedersen, Krise eller Strategi?: Pladebranchen 1995 til 2005, 2005 (?), Piratgruppen.org, http://piratgruppen.org/spip.php?page=rapport (Danish)
Categories: Copyright infringement of software | Computer crimes
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Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:55:07 GMT+00:00
OfficialWire (press release) Vietnam"s software market is developing, despite the problem of software piracy , which still accounts for around 85% of software, compared with 76% in ...
Konstantin Kovalev
Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:47:59 GM
Adobe encourages . software piracy. . Ok, the first version of the post title was even more tough, something like Adobe, burn in hell! or so. But finally I got easy and decided to choose something more journalistic. ...
