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In 2001, one of the most famous copyright infringement cases in the music industry happened between A & M Records and Napster. Napster had started a website which allowed the users to download old & new songs of any genres, all base on their own liking. However, although this act seemed to be a generous act in sharing resources, A & M Records accused Napster of stealing music and making it available for the whole world, and this eventually caused Napster to be landed with a copyright infringement lawsuit. The copyright infringement case ended with Napster closing down the website and having to pay around USD 26 million to songwriters and recording companies who were involved with the case.
A brief glance-through on the famous copyright infringement cases in the history exposed to us on the fact that the music industry are the industry which faces the most copyright infringement cases along the years.
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How many of you download your music instead of buying them? For me, I rarely even purchase music these days. I remember in the not too many years ago, music downloading was not a trend, and I still remember vividly how I endured hungriness for weeks just to purchase my favorite album. Today, we can simply obtain all our favourite songs or even movies without a single cent spent. Where did all the appreciation of music or things produced today?
Although the idea of copyright had been ever since 400 years ago, it is now being considered as an outdated concept, basing on the fact that the technology advance in our society had been improved in to the digital world, in which individuals today can access everything and anything without the actual need to waste more cash and time just to purchase or obtain something they really like. Music, videos, movies, files, software, books are examples of substances that individuals can obtain. In the past, it is easier to track down the individuals who are involved in the duplication of products, because in the past, products are in a material form; whilst now, in this evolved digital era, we are dealing with data and information, which are now seen to be more important and more powerful than physical materials.
Seeing these changes, there is a need to change the structure and concept of the traditional idea of copyrighting. Instead of the inflexible way of restricting the use and redistribution of materials in the past, the copyright today has evolved in a way in suiting to the pace of the society’s modernized changes. And this is where the Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the Creative Commons come into place.
The common way for companies to protect their products today is by technologically embedding the copyright in the media text itself. In my opinion, this is definitely an effective way to protect the content because as the technology knowledge of individuals had improved rapidly today, they would definitely try to figure out all kinds of way to obtain the content they desire. Thus, the only way to protect ourselves is to be better than them. All kinds of codes can be developed in which these codes will solely be owned by the company itself, and if individuals desire to “explore” the content in a deeper level (such as duplicating the content instead of just viewing it), they would need to acquire permission from the owner, and the owner will then provide these individuals with the permission (base on the reason the individuals are using the content for) and this permission can only be used by the individual alone – with the development of special, individualized codes – ant no one else.
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The new concept of copyright in use to adapt itself to the changes of the society is definitely an ideal way to use in protecting one’s product. However, Snapper also raised the concern of plagiarism being a more important problem to be focused on instead of the copyright infringement issue in the digital age today.
“Piracy is the infringement of copyright, and plagiarism is the failure to give credit.”
As mentioned, in today’s World Wide Web, we can distribute and share everything and anything everywhere we want. It is indeed a hard-to-control factor, but most concern should be placed on the issue of plagiarism, and this idea is exceptionally applicable to us students today.
We had learned about the importance of giving credit to the person we obtained the idea from, no matter in the research project or any assessment we are conducting. Giving credit to the information we obtained online is especially tricky. When we obtain information from the Web, we must always remember to ask two important questions:
- Is the source credible?
- How should we credit the person’s work that we are using?
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It is very hard to distinguish on what and which source is credible today. The Internet itself is like a world filled with information which is uploaded by individuals and it changes from time to time.
Plagiarism has often occurs because of the easy duplication of information. But the problem is, we can also accuse that we are simply “improvising” from the original source – which we might assume them to be not credible – and that we are doing the other millions and billions of users on the Internet a favour for not misleading them. How do we know that who is telling the truth?
I realized that this is a problem we should ponder on, especially it extremely relevant to us, not only now, but also in the near future when we are conducting more researches. We must realize that the usage of sources whose credibility is not being verified can lead to more confusion and in the same time, misleading the individuals who will be reading our writings in the future. If we just let the problem be and assume that all long articles or writings obtained from the Internet are credible, it would be another cycle of recycling non-credible information all over again, and as the situation continues over time, the line between the truth and the assumption will be blurred, leading to a threat of knowledge-obtaining by the next generations.
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In my opinion, the highlight of Snapper in his writing is an important one. Plagiarism has become so easy today due to the easy duplication of materials on the Web. Copyright today is “rebranding” into a new concept which can be adapted into the digital age. Plagiarism should follow the footstep of copyright as well. Because, as Snapper stated in his writing, copyright is necessary because it protects the owner of the product by “granting control over the information or ideas”. But the control on plagiarism is also necessary – especially in the digital era – because plagiarism allows individuals to simply “take information without giving credit, even if there is no piracy form of expression.”
For instance, assuming that you had worked very hard on writing a book and the happiest moment of your life is therefore to see your book being distributed and sold to the public and of course, to see your name on the book cover. But the next thing you know, you see your writings, the ideas you had explored and worked on for so long, and your style of writing being wide-spread on the net. And suddenly, everyone anonymous is claiming that your idea belongs to theirs. Facing with such situations, how would you feel?
Thus, as a conclusion, I think that Snapper had raised an issue that all of us should be concerned of. Regulations and actions should be created to address this issue, so that proper credibility and recognition can be given to the owner of the ideas and writings after all the hard work and tough times they had went through to share their ideas with everyone. And it is just wrong for us to claim the ideas for ourselves, when we did nothing but typing in the search bar on the Internet and copying everything into our writings.
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I personally think that it is a necessary act to protect the ideas and materials of individuals, or else who would want to make huge effort to deliver their ideas when they can simply obtain fantastic ideas from anywhere and wherever they want. However, individuals today have less concern and awareness toward the regulation of copyright just because copying, downloading, and duplicating materials from the original source can be easily done and it is so hard for the companies to track down these behaviours. Individuals have indeed created new ideas from old ideas, which is still not an original idea because it had been derived from somewhere else. This touches on the issue of plagiarism and copyright in the same time. Perhaps companies should direct to a whole new direction – seeing the evolution of technology today – instead of forcing individuals to commit to all kinds of do’s and don’ts, companies should control innovation of individuals from the original product and encourage them in the same time – in a right way – as a step to neutralize the imbalance between fake and real in the materials we have today. Individuals should learn to recognize the effort of the original source, and, if they are involved in innovating the original source, they should also give recognition to themselves base on the parts they had innovated from the original source.
References:
Snapper, JW 1999, On the Web, plagiarism matters more than copyright piracy, accessed 13/9/2012, http://www.springerlink.com/content/l215064qj8kk1331/
Crews, KD 2001, ‘A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.: Implications for the Digital Music Library’, accessed 13/9/2012, http://variations2.indiana.edu/pdf/AnalysisOfNapsterDecision.pdf
Cheryl Lim 
I do agree with you that copyright is necessary to encourage individuals to constantly create things. However, in some cases artists themselves even endorse the use of their music. For instance, take the ‘Meme proposal’ featuring the song ‘A thousand years’ that went viral late last year. Christina Perri, the singer, even went to the extent of tweeting about how honored she was to be singing through the video. In fact, YouTubers even commented that it was the Meme proposal that brought them to the original music video for A thousand years on YouTube. Which goes to show that copyright laws aren’t necessarily entirely positive or negative.