The Modern Problems That Copyright Experts Deal With

Because of modern technology and the internet, issues regarding intellectual property and copyright protection have become exceedingly broad and complex. As a result, a community of copyright experts has grown to meet the burgeoning problems that have come up in the past decades. This community is made up of skilled professionals who cover just about every angle of copyright protection.

Legal Problems for Copyright Experts

In the area of law, intellectual property has become a recognized and distinct practice that requires its own experts. In the past twenty years, it has chalked up its share of famous cases known to the public. Just as there are divorce lawyers, there are lawyers that focus on copyrights and its attendant concerns.

Counterfeiting is one of the legal problems that today’s experts must deal with. Strictly speaking, copyright infringements are distinct from the problem of counterfeiting since copyrights apply mostly to creative works. Nonetheless, counterfeiting belongs within the same purview and today’s experts have had to deal with it more and more frequently.

This type of infringement occurs everywhere in the world, even in the United States. In bargain stores and in some boutiques, the knock off or fake bags, purses and items are easy to obtain at the fraction of the price that the genuine article would cost. Every now and then authorities make an effort to enforce the law by raiding stores that often flagrantly display fakes. But the stores have their ways of anticipating trouble. Most stores will now put the questionable items at the back of the store. Some will display items without the trademark and ask customers upon purchase if they want the appropriate logo attached.

Copyright Piracy in the 21st Century

Just as pirates have plundered the seas for centuries, so too, pirates have infringed on copyrighted items for a long, long time. Even before 1709, when the Statute of Anne defined unauthorized copying, distribution and selling as wrongful acts, persons violating the exclusive rights of authors had been called pirates. To this day, the term "piracy" is used to refer to these violations.

This issue has acquired serious attention from the global community. The 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) bound all its parties to impose criminal procedures and penalties when willful counterfeiting or copyright piracy was done on a commercial scale.

More recently, a new and pervasive form of this piracy has taken place in the form of unsanctioned peer-to-peer file sharing of music, television shows, movies and video recordings. This modern and largely uncontrolled form of piracy is more sternly referred to as theft.

Because of the ease with which copies of recordings can be made and reproduced and because sharing information has become so effortless, there are no limits to the extent to which online piracy can be conducted. One of the most famous copyright infringement cases is the Napster case.

Napster and File Sharing as Copyright Infringement

In 1999, a file-sharing program called Napster came up on the internet allowing computer users to share and swap files through a centralized server. The Napster program which combined a search engine for music, a file sharing system and instant messaging gained millions of followers and became popular especially among university students. The Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster for facilitating infringement. In its defense, Napster argued that its traffic fell under fair use since it was not selling the downloaded music.

Napster lost this case but not before it had completely changed the way people use the internet. Today, people go to the internet to find songs, movies and recordings that they can download from numerous websites that provide hyperlinks for file sharing. Enforcement has been done to stop this, often involving international resources in the process. Still, servers continue to mushroom and though many, such as TV link, are shut down, new ones just come up in their place.

The copyright experts of today are dealing with a prolific and highly elusive method of infringement. Evidently, legal judgments are no longer enough to inhibit piracy in this new form. It is perhaps time for experts to see what technology can do to help enforce what is stated in the law.

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