INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHT ON THE INTERNET

Intellectual Property Right On The Internet

Table of Content

INTRODUCTION1

Problem Statement1

Background of the Research1

Theoretical Framework1

LITERATURE REVIEW2

METHODOLOGY9

Research Method9

Literature Search9

Data Analysis9

References11

INTRODUCTION

Problem Statement

The internet has slowly crept up on us in the last 10 to 15 years, and there are now legal issues about intellectual property, and wether the internet should act as a common carrier or a publisher, let me explain.

Background of the Research

A telephone company, for example, is a common carrier. If an obscene caller is bothering you, the phone company will co-operate with police, but nobody thinks it's the phone company's fault some creep keeps calling you. Magazines and newspapers act as a publisher. They are legally responsible for their content and can be sued. The internet, however, acts as both a common carrier and a publisher. When it acts as a common carrier, for example chat rooms, forums and bulletin boards, the rules of the common carrier would apply. When it acts as a publisher, like articles or information the website have written and edited themselves, it makes sense the rules of publishing would apply, but isn't that simple to classify the internet.

Theoretical Framework

Right now, on the popular search engine 'Google", there are approximately 4,285,199,774 WebPages on the database, and Google searches less then a quarter of pages on the internet. And don't forget, every day thousands of websites launch. With all those WebPages on the internet, it would be impossible to classify the every single page, with humans OR with a computer application, since there's not enough CPU power in the world to power a classification system like that.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Now that I have talked about general copyright and plagiarism on the internet, I will talk more specifically on internet music downloads. In the music industry various artists work hard in order to make music that many people enjoy listening to. They then sell their music to record companies such as Arista, RCA, Warner Brothers, and Jive, just to name a few. These record companies make multi million-dollar deals with these artists with the intentions that once they distribute the artists' music to the record stores they will be selling a favourable amount of albums. In today's ever advancing technology, music is basically being stolen off of the internet through mp3 databases such as Kazaa and Imesh. People are able to sign onto the internet, and are able to type in the name of the song, and then are able to download that particular song usually within five minutes.

Now the problem becomes; how are the record companies, and most importantly the artists going to make money if their work is basically being given away on the internet? These people who download music do not even have to leave their homes, and they can listen to the hottest and latest music in the industry. The defence stated by Kazaa is that they are basically advertising the music for the artist for free over the Internet. The consumer is in a sense able to sample the music before ...