The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Piracy has become a major issue in the United States. For every motion picture that has been featured in theaters also has been pirated onto the Internet the next day, and for every new musical album that is released, yet there is a free torrent file of the album within the same hour. Even though these online pirates steal music and movies from other companies and make a drastic profit, yet these “rogue” websites receive 53 billions visits a year from across the globe according to Creative America. The persistence of the thieves that break copyright laws of the productions has lead the entertainment business to place a definitive complaint to the U.S. government of the constant notion of piracy. While the notion of piracy was not left

Despite copyright law 's prevalence in out everyday life, few are wary of the potential risks of its uncontested expansion. The law has been allowed to continuously expand with little or no opposition due to a lack of public awareness surrounding the issue. That was until the mufti-corporation sponsored bills SOPA and PIPA made headline news in 2011. These failed bills were an explicit attempt to increase the enforcement of copyright law over the internet.

In the global market that we leave in companies are trying to find any and everyway that they can to get ahead in their respective markets. This most of the time brings out the most innovate thinkers that can come up with a way to keep it’s company on top of their market and sometimes we see that there are companies that like to take a short cut by using non legal and malicious methods. According to Lewis, (1985), Software piracy is the illicit copying of the operating instructions and applications programs, which make computers work, is a large and growing industry. The Pirate Bay is part of a European social and political movement that opposes copyrighted content and demands that music, videos, TV shows, and other digital content be free and unrestricted. In the words of the Pirate Party, “the Pirate Bay is a unique platform for distributing culture between regular people and independent artists, and that’s something we want to preserve.”

I’m afraid that the issues that had to do with the rights for creators of content (authors of music, books, papers, etc.) to be able to profit from their work without being deprived of their livelihoods due to piracy, was confounded due to the ignorance of law makers about the nature of the Internet (the free flow of ideas, the ability to collaborate with people from all over the world and engage in thoughtful discourse and debate, etc.). Further, the influence of money and pressure being brought upon the government to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) by very wealthy and influential organizations (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_official_stances_on_the_SOPA_and_PIPA ) created undue pressure to get Congress to act without thoughtful investigation into the

Traditional legal principles and processes are constantly challenged by the need to keep pace with copyright issues in particular piracy. The Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015

B. Relevance: The Internet has changed the way we all live. It is at our disposal with many advantages and some disadvantages, piracy being one of them. The Stop Online Piracy Act,

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) was a bill proposed in the House of Representatives that aimed to tackle the growing problem of online piracy and copyright infringement. It targets foreign-based websites that contain any form of unauthorized copyright-infringing material such as movies or music by giving content-creators the right to stop any US businesses from providing payment services, advertising, or even dealing with prosecuted websites; essentially blacklisting and hiding these websites to any US visitors. The bill is split into two main sections: “Combating Online Piracy”, which provides tools for rights holders to protect their content, and “Additional Enhancements to Combat Intellectual Property Theft.”, which criminal law which as applies to intellectual property rights and increases punishments for leaking government information. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) was not enacted because of very strong opposing public opinion, its highly broad and unconstitutional policies that restricted speech, and presidential leadership against the bill.

One of the ethical implications to consider when engaging in actions that violate the DMCA is that the industry could be losing money due to some of their products being distributed for free on the world wide web, also they could be spending a lot of money in setting up online piracy-detecting software to prevent these illegal activities from happening. Every person who illegally downloads copies of online content is costing these industries monetary losses. These contents are not just “free for all,” DMCA violations hurt people who are involved in the making of these contents such as the entertainment, media, journalism and publishing industries.

The era of cable television reaches its final breath. Digital media begins flourishing. Online communities and social media reign over, spoiling our fingers with content of all calibers. The internet is causing a change so radical that legal matters are still catching up with it. As the Founding Fathers intended, effective law should include creating law adapts to society’s changes. However, change hasn’t occurred yet. The American copyright law only gets more controversial as it butts its way in. There is now a three-way skirmish between creators, large corporations and legislature for a simple reason. It is preventing creative freedom and distribution of content online. The American copyright law is ironically limiting much of this generation’s creativity by preventing exposure, criminalizing the wrong people and letting others take advantages of its own loopholes.

Digital piracy on music has been a majorly disputed affair for the last eighteen years, about whether or not it favors the musical artists or affects them in a negative fashion. One of the many sides of the Digital piracy controversy expounds that it benefits the artist(s) by giving them a great deal of exposure that they may not have received had they not downloaded it for free, which in turn makes for a very significant acquisition in terms of sales on their part.

Current copyright protection is entitled to provide the essential mechanism for the insurance of the success viability of creative industries by rewarding and incentivising the creators of original works relating to films, music and broadcasts. The Copyright Act 1968 is initially designed to protect although, despite this, the advancement of technology has led to abuse of the Act, subsequently to withhold its dexterity, the Act has required modification, through; case and statute law. While acknowledging this, it must be understood that the codes; Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), Copyright Regulations 1969 (Cth), Copyright Tribunal Procedure Regulations 1969 (Cth) and the Copyright International Protection Regulations 1969 (Cth) are applied automatically once the work has been published in an accessible format; provided that the author/s are current citizens or residents of Australia. Throughout this report, the Copyright Act 1968 will be analysed in depth to provide a detailed understanding of whether it is possible for the law to be proactive with regards to future technologies. In a developing world of rapid changes and advancements in technology and human behaviour, there is no specific measure that can completely eliminate online copyright infringement.

copyright laws with much of the rest of the world. DMCA criminalizes production and distribution of technology, devices, and or services that are intended to circumvent measures digital rights management or DRM that control access to copyrighted works. The act criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself downloading and/or sharing of copyrighted material. In addition, the DMCA increases the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet (Kankanala,2012). A case that in recent years that involved fair use and the enforcement of the DMCA was the case of A&M Records v. Napster,

It is important that the United States created these copyright laws in order to protect the rights of artists and their work. If these laws were not in place, then the work of these artists could be stolen and they would not make a profit off of their work.

Online piracy is commonly referred to as a threat to businesses in the creative industries. The WTO Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (a.k.a. “the TRIPS” agreement) defines piracy as:

The rise of the Internet era opened the whole new market for traditional media full of opportunities as well as threats. Online piracy being one of them because the music and film industry loses £5.4bn in a year and if it was reduced by 10% it could have created up to 13 thousand jobs in the UK. There are various attempts taken to fight with online piracy; a case study of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will be considered as well as other legislations attempting to regulate copyrights in the Internet. This