Introduction
Work of art, music, writing, film making, symbols, names and slogans among many others categories all have a creator behind them (Giannakas 82); for this reason, individual’s creative expressions and innovations are very valuable and therefore there is need to protect this kind of work in order to prevent people from copying or duplicating individual’s hard work without any permission and credit to it (Bainbridge 57). In order to prevent such actions, any inventor who is seeking protection of the particular items must disclose the full details of the invention they have made in order to benefit from the current laws on intellectual property protection and thereby prevent any other person from using or even selling the inventions of any kind and form (Giannakas 482).
Main body
Issues related to copying, duplicating, plagiarism, or piracy of people’s original creations are protected by the intellectual property law which has been put in place to safeguard infringements of property rights that is very common especially in today’s era of globalization (Adelaide.edu). In recent years, there has been a lot of technological advancement, issues of globalization have developed significantly and therefore intellectual property protection has become a great challenge since the emergence of internet communication has facilitated easier and faster transfer of ideas and consequently made it hard for individuals to define what entails copyright infringement and the actual actions of intellectual property (Adelaide.edu).
Additionally, the wide global use of internet has created a lot of confusion and many people today, have extremely different opinions regarding the right definition of piracy when it comes to downloading electronic materials. This is because some individuals see this as infringement of intellectual property law while others view it as a way of distributing materials for other users in what is referred as peer-peer file use (Copyrightservice.co.uk).
So, as we have clearly seen, internet and globalization has had a great impact on issues related to infringement of the people’s intellectual property and plagiarism in general, this makes it a little bit hard for one to protect individual work primarily over the internet because different people have varied opinions regarding availability of such materials. In this regard, the following discussion will analyze the Copyright Act and how it protects against use of materials that are on the website.
The Copyright Act
The first step involves getting to understand what Copyright Act really entails; copyright is the protection of the genuine original work of an individual and not the mere ideas that relate to it (Benedict.com). Generally, copyright falls under the intellectual property rights and therefore automatically guarantees protection of individual’s original and unique works of art, music, logos, film and so forth (Benedict.com). This kind of protection is normally airtight and safeguard against copying and unauthorized use of materials including those resources on the websites (Benedict.com).
The Copyright Act, 1968 has been granted absolute license in regulating copyright laws and primarily prevents other people from using, copying, circulating other people’s work or even adapting such categories of work whose right vary depending on the nature of work (Copyrightservice.co.uk).
However, ones individual work, under this Act is not given 100% protection because of “fair dealing and fair usage” provisions contained in the Act which allows up to an extent some amount of copying (Benedict.com).
Due to issues of technological change and the coming of digital age era, the laws that govern use of materials on the internet also have undergone tremendous changes and amendments to cater for these changes in today’s globalized world (Protectionofwork. com). For these reasons, the Copyright Act, 1968 also gives exclusive rights to all materials that are made available on the websites in certain measures to ensure that owners of websites and originals works on the internet are fully protected. Through such laws, copyright agencies work on the assumption that internet materials are meant for public domain and therefore any unauthorized use of such material available on the internet is a crime punishable by law (Adelaide.edu).
Based on this Act for instance, written materials, film work, musical work, artistic work and sound recorded work is given protection that normally lasts for about “50 years following the death” (Adelaide.edu) of the creator of such materials. According to the same Act any unpermitted use such as copying of others peoples work from their websites to another website is seriously treated as violation of the Copyright Act which is definitely punishable by law (Adelaide.edu).
However, it should be noted that, copyright protection against such use of internet materials does not at guarantee that the materials available on the internet will not be plagiarized or copied since it is very difficult to monitor the activities and use of materials on the internet (Adelaide.edu). This is because now and then people are making new innovations which mean internet content keeps increasing on the websites with each passing day in order to avail such material to the general public through a medium that is very hard to monitor and control use of website content (Adelaide.edu). Anyone who uses such materials without any permission is therefore taken to have broken copyright law which is a crime punishable either by serving a severe jail term or paying fines for damage incurred by the owner of the original work (Adelaide.edu). Recently, there has been increased use of internet globally and this had made it hard to limit people from using materials on the website and as such the only best consolation for authors of the original work on the websites is seeking more restrictive measures that will ensures that their original work is protected fully and effectively; this means whole protection of website is what is needed rather than parts of its content (Protectionofwork.co.uk).
In this regard it is unlikely that the Copyright Act will be effective in protecting parts of the website such as images, some texts, and logos among others rather than just collectively protecting the whole of it. It is most likely that such a policy might be very challenging to implement since it is already very hard to protect whole website as is currently the case. This is mostly because it is very tedious to monitor activities of individual’s websites and track such isolated parts of internet sections that are of interest due to the ever growing demand and increased usability of the internet use. In any case it is obvious that it is less tiring and time consuming when tracking occurrence of plagiarism on whole part of website rather than parts of it. This is because parts will naturally be many and varied; this will therefore require many resources to track plagiarism occurrence at the same level.
Reasons against protection of individual parts on the websites
Foremost, if for some reason an individual decides to only protect some materials or parts of the website, such as a company logo for instance, it then becomes very difficult for the particular website user to actually note or know that “a logo” has been given a license against any copying (Benedict.com). This is mainly because, when materials are available for general use on the internet most people accessing websites will not put much effort on finding out if the content they are interested in have been copyrighted as they are most interested in finding and making use of relevant information.
Secondly, the Copyright Act states that “copyright law does not protect names, title or short phrases” (Copyright.gov) which is by itself a very ambiguous provision that mostly serves to open the door on plagiarism rather than shut it. The Copyright Act is in fact toothless in protection of a whole range of rights on some parts such as name of products, mottos, slogans, or even label of works among many others following the laws put under section 102 of the copyright act (Copyright.gov); this means that copying can actually be justified under this section. According to this section of the Act, the only exclusive right that can be accorded to any work is only “original works of authorship” (Copyright.gov) which is hard to tell let alone recognize.
Furthermore, under this statute, the copyright agency does not have any authority to administer copyright just yet without having to put into considering issues to do with the minimum amount of authorship in all creative and innovative work and so forth (Copyright.gov). In this case, according to the Copyright Act, individual materials such as name, logos and other short phrases actually do not meet the minimum amounts requirements that can allow such materials or parts to be accorded the exclusive rights against duplication or copying (Copyright.gov).
Besides, I am of the opinion that, copyright should protect all the materials on the internet as opposed to protection of only some parts of it which may be tricky due to the high level of technology that is currently possible. This is because a person may actually be able to download specific work of others without being detected or even slightly changing the content of the original work so as to pass the altered documents as originals. Additionally, it would also be challenge to protect some of the materials on the websites alone based on the fact that it might bring up the issues of unfair competition (Copyright.gov). If some parts like logos, labels, companies name, name of certain products among others are given the right to protection, this might in one way or the other promote unfair usage because companies or individual business people might be unable to benefit from such inventions which should be fairly used.
Moreover, it is very inadequate in trying to seek protection of individual parts of website materials because in one way or the other this would also facilitate more acts of violation to the intellectual property rights because it would also mean that, by protecting some materials, other material or elements on the same website will always remain vulnerable to being plagiarized, duplicated, or being pirated (Copyrightservice.co.uk). At the same time individuals creative work will be subjected to plagiarism by default due to the massive amount of individual original works protected.
Furthermore, based on the facts that such works are on the internet and are vast in number, it would also be very hard to monitor when infringement of the intellectual materials occurs without having to use significant amount of resources which are limited anyway. Because of internet being flooded with every kind of information it will also be very hard to make a proper follow up and thereby correctly monitor and prevent such plagiarism from occurring.
Conclusion
It clear that, intellectual property laws such as the Copyright Act is meant to nature and encourage innovation among individual by allowing inventors of any work the exclusives right to protection of their original work (Giannakas 482). However, the answer to the question as whether it is sufficient for the Copyright Act to give exclusive rights of protection on some materials or parts on the websites as opposed to protection of the materials as a whole would definitely be no for the various reasons discussed in this paper. The policy cannot work and therefore should not be implemented to solve the ever rising issues of piracy, copying and duplication of materials online.
My opinion is that, the only good remedy for copyright protection is the enactment of the Copyright Act as it is; in fact I believe that a lot of forethought must have gone to this dilemma before the lawmakers finally decided to adopt this strategy of whole website copyright protection rather parts of it. This is the only way that website original works can be effectively protected as compared to the piecemeal protection of parts of the website and thereby ensure that inventors do not shy away for fear of being infringed their intellectual property rights. Additionally, due to the ever growing use of internet every day, the copyright agencies should equally increase their techniques in order to ensure they are able to detect such cases with ease so that the industry of creativity can become more civilized.
Reference
Adelaide.edu. “ Copyright Act 1968. 2011.” Web.
Benedict.com. (2011). “Patent, trademark and copyright. 2011.” Web.
Bainbridge, D. “Intellectual Property”. New Jersey: Pearson Logman Press. 2009.
Benedict.com. “Patent, trademark and copyright. 2011.” Web.
Copyrightservice.co.uk. “Copyright infringement. 2009.”
Copyright.gov. “Copyright Protection Not Available for Names,Titles, or Short Phrases. 2010.”
Colangelo, A. “Copyright Infringement in the Internet Era: The Challenge of MP3s. 2002.” Web.
Giannakas ,K. “Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights: Causes and Consequences. American Journal of Agricultural Economics. 2(2002) pp.482-494.
Protectionofwork.co.uk. “Protection of work. 2009.” Web.
Protectionoflogo.co.uk. “Protection of logo. 2009.” Web.