Copyright: Political Driving Forces

Political Driving Forces

Description

The intention of Copyright law is to encourage the creavtive work, and thus to secure for the creator of a creative effort the exclusive right to control who can make copies. Typically, a work must meet minimal standards of originality in order to qualify for copyright, and the copyright expires after a set period of time (some jurisdictions may allow this to be extended). Different countries impose different tests, although generally the requirements are low; in the United Kingdom there has to be some 'skill, originality and work' which has gone into it. However, even fairly trivial amounts of these qualities are sufficient for determining whether a particular act of copying constitutes an infringement of the author's original expression. In Australia, it has been held that a single word is insufficient to comprise a copyright work.In the United States, copyright has relatively recently been made automatic, which has had the effect of making it more like a property right.

Copyrights are generally enforced by the holder in a civil law court, but there are also criminal infringement statutes. Criminal sanctions are generally aimed at serious counterfeiting activity, but may now become more commonplace as the copyright collectives like the RIAA are more and more targeting the file sharing home Internet user. Thus far however, these cases have usually been settled outside of court, with demands of payment of several thousand dollars accompanied by nothing more than a threat to sue the file sharer, thus such cases do not even make it to civil law courts in reality.

Enablers

[Rick Boucher]

[Jorge Cortell]

[Robin Gross]

Inhibitors

[Rick Boucher] [Jorge Cortell] [Robin Gross]