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Canada's Copyright Law
Canada's copyright law is one of our hardest laws to enforce. The
reason the police have so much trouble enforcing this law, is due to
technology. This law is very easy to break, and once broken, it is very
hard to track down violators. So although some form of a copyright law is
needed, the one we have has, too many holes to be effective. There are
three main ways in which the copyright law is broken in everyday life.
They is audio/video tape copying, plagiarism, and software piracy.
The first, and most commonly violated aspect of the copyright law,
is the copying of audio tapes for oneself and friends. Thanks to the
invention of dual cassette stereos, this has become very easy. You simply
take an original or even another copy of a tape, as well as a blank tape.
Stick them both in to the stereo and bingo you have a new tape. You also
just broke the law.
Along with copying audio tapes, now we can copy video tapes almost
as easily. If you hook two VCR's together, they can copy from one to the
other. You could rent a movie form the video store, copy and return it,
with no one the wiser.
The problem with copying video and audio tapes is that for every
copy you make the recording artist, the actors, producers and everyone
else who collect royalties from the tapes lose money. If the companies
start to lose money, they raise prices. Thus a vicious circle begins. As
prices go up, fewer people buy original copies. If less people buy the
original cassettes prices will once again rise.
Another major form of piracy is plagiarism. The stealing of
someone elses ideas or work. The biggest category of people who fall into
here are students. Very often a student when doing a research paper will
"accidently" forget to footnote his work. By "forgetting" to give the
author credit, the student has claimed the work as his own. Another
reason students may copy someone else's work is to sound more
sophisticated hoping that if they use someone elses words it will sound
better than their own. Generally, this provides an easy way for a teacher
or the police to catch them.
Teachers also plagiarize rather frequently. Very often a teacher
will photocopy several pages from a book, in order to save the students
the expense of having to buy the book for themselves. While this is a
noble act by the teacher, in most cases, this is illegal. Unless the
author of the book, gave consent for his/her work to be freely distributed,
teachers can't copy it any more than students or anyone else can.
The third category of piracy is Software Pirating. There are
several forms which this can take. The most common form is very similar
to audio/video cassettes. It is when someone copies a game or program
from his/her computer to someone elses. As long as the two people have
the same type of computer, (they both have apples or IBM's) this is a
very simple process, so long as the programmer didn't put a bug into the
program (a precaution they take against people copying their work).
Another form of Computer Piracy is a "cracker". A cracker is someone
who has an in-depth knowledge of computers and programming. He can then
remove the "bug" that prevents programs from being copied. After he
removes the bug he's able to distribute the software at his own discretion.
This is in direct conflict with the copyright law, because the program
was not meant to be copied thus the bug. It therefore becomes illegal
to remove the bug.
Like audio/video cassettes copying, computer games causes people
to lose money. In this case, instead of it being the singer, or actors,
it is the programmer, and the software companies who lose. This leads to
the same vicious circle. More copies make higher prices etc..
The copyright law is hard to enforce likewise so are the penalties.
If you are found in violation of breaking the copyright laws, you
probably will only have to pay a fine. However, the fines can be quite
substantial and depending where you are in the distribution chain (how
many copies were made before yours) the fine varies, with whoever copied
the original paying the most. In extreme cases, where a contract is
enacted upon the purchase of the original copy like with Word Perfect, a
computer word processor. Upon buying an original set off disks you must
sign a contract promising not to distribute the program. In these cases,
you could face imprisonment because now not only are you dealing with
breach of the copyright law, but with a breach of contract as well. So the
moral of the story is enjoy your large collection of audio/video tapes.
Get those good marks on essays you didn't even write. Enjoy those really
fun computer games, because under Canada's current copyright law and the
amount of attention the police pay to this problem, it is very unlikely
that you will ever get caught.
ADDITIONAL FEATURED ESSAYS
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