This past class Jason L. Hardin, the Manager of Access Services here at Trinity, came to talk to us about copyright laws. So what exactly is copyright? A copyright protects someone’s intellectual property. It is a government protection and is a crime for copyright infringement. A copyright kicks in when a thought is put into a tangible, fixed medium. One issue that is a concern for many colleges across the country is file sharing. Students often use file sharing to attain free music, movies, TV shows, etc. Now there is nothing wrong with file sharing, it is perfectly legal, but using file sharing to access stuff that is not yours (i.e. free music) and you have not paid for is illegal. There are people today whose sole job is to seek out copyright infringement and illegal file sharing. They can look at a computer’s IP address, which is an eleven to twelve digit number that uniquely identifies a computer, and track down the person committing the crime. You can then get slapped with a lawsuit, and those are not cheap. They can cost thousands of dollars and around $750 per song. Bottom line is it is not worth it. You may get away with it for awhile, but if you are caught it could cost thousands of dollars.
Copyright and Creative Commons by Zach Lambert is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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