Internet Safety and Copyright

Internet Safety and Copyright

Judge David Harvey has been a District Court Judge for 13 years. He has been involved with computers for 21 years and teaches the Law and Information Technology course at the Faculty of Law at AucklandUniversity. He has written widely on Law and Internet topics.

Every time you download a webpage you are copying material. The images, the text, the sounds that you may hear are all copied into your computer. Using a computer involves copying material. Some copying is lawful. Every time you start your computer, material is copied from your hard drive into the computer’s processors. If you purchased your operating system with the computer, or from a retailer, you are entitled to use that program.

Although you may think you completely own the program, you do not. You cannot copy the program and give it to someone else. That is because the developer of the program owns what is called the intellectual property or copyright in the program. There may also be a licence agreement that came with the program when you purchased it that contains some restrictions on what you can do with the program. You should read these conditions before you use the program.

Computers and the Internet make copying very easy. You may think it is OK to copy a track from a CD onto your hard drive, or convert it to an MP3. It is not – that is a breach of copyright. You may think it is OK to share some of your MP3 files on your hard drive with your friends, but it is not. It is a breach of copyright.  You may think that it is OK to use a file sharing program like Gnutella or Limewire and download MP3 files or movie files or any other files from other people on the Internet, but it is not. It is breach of copyright.

Only the owner of the copyright can authorise the making of copies. There are some things you can copy without asking the copyright owner’s permission. Copying a couple of pages from a textbook for the purposes of study is OK. Copying the WHOLE book is breach of copyright. In the same way, copying a whole song from a CD or downloading a whole song (or a whole album) from the Internet is a breach of copyright.

So what? Who is going to know? Who is going to find out? The record companies and the movie companies are becoming very aggressive in protecting their rights. They shut down Napster and Audiogalaxy, two file sharing sites. There are programs that copyright owners use that can identify individuals who are sharing files on the internet, and they can find out who you are. So there is a risk of detection if you are sharing files on the internet and breaching copyright.

The consequences for breach of copyright are very severe. You can be ordered to pay large sums in damages. If you are engaged in commercial copyright infringement you could even be sent to prison.

Internet safety means not taking risks. If you cannot be sure that what you are doing is within the law, you are taking a risk. So before you copy that file, think about what you are doing, and if there is a risk involved – DON’T.