LT A Reflection Week 3
Jan McKenzie, Jeremy Sawyer
LAW/421
December 9, 2013
Aretha Somerville

LT A Reflection Week 3
In the second week, one of the topics covered was the area of copyrights. These were basic rules and regulations brought about to help protect an individual or business’ intellectual property. The advent of cyberspace brought about further issues that forced Copyright Laws to adapt to the rapid changes technology brought with it.
To begin with, one team member looked at the origin of copyright law. Its creation in 1976 was to protect the “rights of literary property as recognized and sanctioned by positive law.” (Melvin, 2011, p. 612). It protects authors, songwriters, musicians, and any other owner of original literary or artistic production of having their work copied without some compensation. In order for something to be copyright protected, the property in question must be original, creative and fixed in a durable medium such as a book or digital media.
The rise of file sharing was an interesting area to examine as it forced copyright law to evolve in order to cover the internet and the challenges it brought with it. The ability to share files in a peer-to-peer format saw a lot of copyrighted items, primarily MP3s at first, to be shareable between users of the internet. This brought about the passing of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) in 1998, which, according to Melvin, 2011, “an attempt to modernize copyright law to deal with the new challenges that had emerged in the digital age.” (p. 616). One of the earliest and most well-known websites the DMCA was able to shut down was Napster.
Another interesting area was the different types of infringement covered underneath copyright law. You have direct, indirect and vicarious for the levels of infringement. An example of direct infringement is taking another’s work and