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Copyright is the reproduction and distribution of materials. Copyright materials are found everywhere around people, these include songs, movies, TV shows, photo’s, magazines and books. These are just a few things subjected to copyright protection.
Materials brought are very limited in the way the person can use them, for example the user can lend the original copy to a friend or family but is not allowed to give them a copy without the permission and even payment to the copyright holder. Copyright can also affect those who play instruments for example can play a recent song but can not perform in front of an audience without permission. Internet users are also bound to these rules, which are acceptable to make copies of music or movies for their personal use which they can transfer to their ipods or any other portable players, but aren’t allowed to give them to anybody else. Lastly users are not allowed to share files over a peer to peer system such as Limewire which gives access to these copyrighted files for personal use without paying for them or unless they have permission from the copyright owner. Users who use p2p file sharing are also at risk from downloading viruses or even sometimes downloading files which are not what they intended to download.
Currently the figures for file sharing has remained the same for nearly two years, this is mainly due to the amount of people who have ipods and the amount of people who tend to use itunes to download their music legally which are pretty cheap and affordable.
According to The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI), there are currently about 870 million songs available to download illegally over the internet.
References:
Stanford university - http://rescomp.stanford.edu/info/dmca/#copyright [online][cited 28/01/08]
BBC news - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4627368.stm [online][cited 28/01/08]
