Intellectual property Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Intellectual property - Essay Example The main purpose of having copyright is to provide authors and artists a chance to produce new works. (Aplin & Davies, 2010) Intellectual property law ensures that authors and artists are given their earnings through official distributors (record companies, for example; Economists refer to these as â€Å"property stewards†) for recordings of this creative and intellectual work, which eventually give money to the authors and artists. Digital technology developers make peer-to-peer networks, which enable people to obtain the same works without paying. Acquiring the works with this method is similar to stealing, as per copyright law, hence it is must to reaffirm, and even extend, copyright law to criminalise the use of networkers who copy others’ work.Hence, what Kenneth performed should be seen as breaching copyright law. The expression of Intellectual Property provides a logical scrutiny of why the music, TV and movie industries’ arguments to develope copyright an d control certain technologies are more persuasive—to judges, justices, university administrators, college students, and the general public—than those of copyright activists who seek to keep peer-to-peer networks free and legal; to restrict the extension of copyright time limits and copy-protection tools; to guarantee a plentiful, continually replenished public domain of content; and to preserve fair use rights for content currently under copyright. By doing research about this topic, one can have a more solid perceptive of the descriptions of â€Å"piracy† and â€Å"sharing,† and can know precisely why so few of the students in University are capable of presenting an argument in favour of file sharing. According to some experts, peer-to-peer network technology can take our society towards a positive direction, but some argue that the same thing is bad for the society. British Government has a plan of introducing a right of information requiring disclosur e of names and addresses of individuals that are involved in the creation and distribution of the infringing goods and services or both with quantities and prices charged. Remedies will be strengthened to permit eternal removal or demolition of the infringing material together with the everlasting injunctions, compensation and damages. Differential attitudes toward theft of physical versus intellectual property (IP) become an increasingly serious problem as the latter become an ever-greater share of the total economic value of production. "Intellectual capital's rising value in the production of wealth has been mirrored by its increasing vulnerability to crime" (Snyder & Crescenzi, 2009). The cost of intellectual property theft in 2004 was estimated to be $250 billion and climbing (Wright, 2004). Losses due to all sorts of piracy in the music and film industries alone are currently estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars (Szuskin, et al., 2009). Hence, Intellectual proper ty theft has become a very serious problem as the result of computers' increasing role in the everyday life of the public (Picard, 2004). Traditional approaches to the prevention of theft are mainly to protect the goods and to catch and punish perpetrators, but these are increasingly difficult to accomplish in this digital age (Peace & Thong, 2003). The facility with which digital information can be stored, communicated, and disseminated makes it exceedingly difficult to contain and protect. When physical property is stolen, its absence makes the theft far more readily noticed than when digital property is copied while the original data remains intact and appears untouched. Thus, detection of the crime and capture of the thief are no easy matter. Despite these limitations, producers of digital property are striving to develop and improve protective measures (Im & Koen, 1990; Waterman, et al., 2007; Wright, 2004). If you learned that a friend had gone into an acquaintance's home and