The+impact+of+advancement+in+digitization+on+copyright+law

=Digitization=

toc Digitization has a great impact on copyright infringement. As technology advances, a lot of conventional tools that people depend on to do their jobs have been transformed into digital tools. This concept complies with the fact that most of the products that people use in their daily life have been replaced by digital products. Due to this digital transformation, a lot of copyrighted products and works can be easily accessed by most people with the help from computer, software and internet. Take music as an example, people used to go to stores to purchase CD albums in which you can barley see this phenomenon nowadays. Also, the invention of CD burner allows people to make copies of copyrighted software and music effortlessly. As you can see from these two examples, digitization provides a more convenient and economical way in which it triggers people to violate the copyright infringement lawunconsciously. When people download copyrighted works from the internet, they knew that it is against the copyright law. However, people enjoy the conveniences and economical way provided by theses digital products that they decided to neglected the fact that they are infringing copyright. As for fair use defense, I don't think digitization has any direct impact on it. As for indirect impact, digitization facilitated the process of unauthorized access to copyrighted materials, so that people can have access to copyrighted work easily. This situation triggers the fair use doctrine in which it allows people to use copyrighted material without authorization in certain circumstances. =**How Digitization Affect Copyright Law**=

[|Copyright law] is a federal law that serves to protect owners of various types of creative works that are being expressed in a fixed and tangible form. These works include music, literature, film, movie, software, books and novels, and variety forms of art works. The purpose of establishing copyright law is to protect owners of creative work, in which it provides them with monopoly of manipulating their own work for any purposes within a stipulated amount of time. Therefore, any individual who attempts to manipulate a piece original work without the owner's consent would be considered as infringement of copyright law. However, there are some cases in which obtaining or using the owner's work without his/her consent would not be considered as infringement of copyright. This is when we deal with fair use (U.S.) and fair dealing (Canada) doctrines. However, we will discuss under what circumstances that copyright law is being violated. First of all, anyone who attempts to duplicate a copyrighted work without the owner's consent has committed the copyright law. As computer technology advances, majority of people are capable making perfect digital copy of copyrighted materials ranging from software, music, films and various other works protected by the copyright. Also, the invention of Internet and various file sharing programs, which facilitated the process of copyright infringement by providing an easier and convenient way for people to distribute and obtain copyrighted materials effortlessly. According to many previous copyright infringement lawsuits. The U.S. court believed that any unauthorized duplication of copyrighted materials in any fixed mediums that are for any purposes other than the ones listed in the fair use doctrine, constitutes infringement of copyright. However, if anyone who attempts to integrate a certain aspect of design from another copyrighted work into his/her own work. The U.S. court will identify whether or not the user's work reveals originality and can be clearly distinguished from the copyrighted work. Only under this circumstance, the user will not be held liable for copyright infringement. Secondly, anyone who attempts to distribute a copyrighted work without the owner's consent has committed the copyright law. Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted work includes leasing, selling, borrowing, posting on websites and many other methods of distribution. According to previous copyright infringement cases, the U.S. court believed that any individual who attempts to distribute unauthorized copyrighted materials in any fixed mediums for any purposes except the ones listed in fair use doctrine constitutes copyright infringement. The court also believed that copyright law should be reinforced to an extent that, discussion forum website administrators are responsible for any unauthorized copyrighted materials being posted on their websites by their subscribers. As you can see that the U.S. court exercises the copyright law to an extent that not only individuals who committed the crime has to be punished, also for those who triggered other individuals to infringe the copyright law are also held liable.

Finally, anyone who attempts to gain access to a copyrighted work without the owner's consent also constitutes copyright infringement. The invention of Internet is one of the most crucial factors that facilitated the unauthorized access to copyrighted materials. With the help from various file sharing programs, literally anyone who has access to internet is one of the potential suspects of committing the copyright law. Ever since file sharing programs gain popularity, especially the music and the movie industries have been suffering from declining in album sales and sales from movie theatre attendances. Many large recording companies decided to take on legal actions against some of the peer-to-peer file sharing programs. The U.S. court believes that any individual who uses file sharing program to download and share copyrighted material constitutes copyright infringement. The U.S. government believes that sharing and downloading copyrighted materials drives many recording companies out of business, and also makes a lot of music artists suffer from income lost. However, the Canadian court believes that downloading copyrighted materials from file sharing programs is legal. The Copyright Board of Canadian decided to add an additional twenty-five dollars on most [|MP3 devices] as compensation to those music artists who suffers from income lost as a result of file sharing. Whereas sharing copyrighted material is illegal, in which the Canadian court believes that users are only entitled to download unauthorized copyrighted material, as opposed to make what you have already downloaded available for anyone else.

=**Napster VS A&M Recoding Company Case**=

As for copyright infringement, one of the most controversial cases related to unauthorized access to copyrighted materials would be the [|Napster] case. The [|A&M record company] has filed a lawsuit against Napster for committing contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. A&M claims that Napster notices other users are using its own program to obtain and share unauthorized copyrighted materials. However, Napster is responsible for preventing such activities being conducted within their own software program but neglected to take any actions to stop it. However, Napster defended that they are only an online service provider that provides online electronic data transmission service for its subscribers. Therefore, Napster claims that they should not be held liable for copyright infringement, in which they should be protected by the safe harbors from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. However, the U.S. court finds that Napster does not meet all the requirements stipulated in the safe harbors law to receive the protection from it. Also, due to the central oriented architecture of the Napster file sharing program, the U.S. court believes that Napster may be responsible for vicarious copyright infringement. The U.S. court also believes that Napster may be responsiblefor contributory copyright infringement since the company neglected to terminate the process of unauthorized sharing of copyrighted materials within their program.

=**Canadian Recording Industry Association v. Twenty Nine P2P Users Case**=

Another case that's relevant to the copyright infringement would be the [|Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA)] filing lawsuit against twenty-nine anonymous people for unauthorized sharing of copyrighted music via peer-to-peer sharing program. CRIA also demanded the internet service provider to reveal the true identity of those twenty-nine people. However, the Canadian court believes that CRIA doesn't have the right to do so. The judge believes that saving a piece of copyrighted work in a folder that can be accessed by other peer-to-peer users isn't valid enough to constitute unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. Also, there is no evidence to prove that those twenty-nine people attempted to distribute those copyrighted materials intentionally as well as telling other people that copies of copyrighted work are available for download. Therefore, the court announced that CRIA doesn't have the right to demand Internet service provider to reveal those twenty-nine subscribers.

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McCullagh, Declan. "[|Newsmaker:] Cyberpiracy north of the border." //Monday// 27 Oct. 2003, CNET News. CNET News. 29 Jan. 2006 <[|Source]>.