5.+My+Report

My Report

 * “The use of digital data covered by Copyright in a multimedia production reflects a lack of creativity and is against the law in all circumstances.” **

The term Copyright is designed to prevent illegal use of work by individuals in the original form of the idea or information expressed by the originator. The rights include to copy, communicate and publically perform the copyright material (Australian Government, 2008) .The digital data covered by the Copyright includes videos, audio, text, hypertext, animation and images.

This media has to be covered by the copyright law so that the original multimedia is protected by the Copyright Act and therefore they have exclusive rights to the developer’s information and that they have control of anyone who has unauthorised exploitation of the developers works. (Radcliffe & Brinson, 1999) The purpose of copyright is to provide people to produce new work for the community safely, but with it being created there is the opportunity to use the work of others, for you to use this work without a license you therefore have to pay the fine. In the copyright law the objective is encouraging the creation of making material available to the social community for purposes such as research and education.

Even though it is illegal to copy others thoughts and ideas, it states in the Copyright Act 1968 that if you have a license from the producer of the work which gives you their permission to copy their material, it is therefore seen to be acceptable. (Australian Government, 2010)

Software authors also need to be protected by copyright, software piracy is when the illegal distribution or reproduction of software applications or fonts are used for businesses or personal use, whether sharing the software is deliberate or not it is still illegal. Software authors need to be protected by copyright so that programs aren’t sold to the general public by burning the applications to CD’s or passing the software along computers through emails or hard disks.

When people are purchasing a software program they are actually purchasing a license to use it, not the software. The license tells you how many times you can install the software and how many copies of the software the license permits. The result of software piracy is that these applications are not freely available and you have to become a licensed user to purchases the rights or buy the software, even though you may own a license you are still unable to put copies on to your peers computers. Although all this happens around the world I believe that copyright usually reflects a lack of creativity in most circumstances.

For example I believe that if you are completing a homework task, or written assessment and you are using the information provided on the internet to copy and paste the author’s notes to complete your homework it is seen as a lack of creativity. The information on the internet is only there as guide and to help with further research. Using others ideas or information is a lack of originality and the task should be done with your own thoughts and knowledge, though in some cases using well known quotes or ideas while referring to the producer of the work is not seen as a lack of originality but a well thought through quote, lyric or text, as a result not all can be seen as copyright.

In some circumstances using others ideas can become very creative. Some examples of this include the rapper Eminem will include quotes or lyrics from other musicians into his music to mimic them. Also artists will usually make remix’s with their songs and a beat from another song in the background, this makes the audience responsive to a familiar beat. For example an audio clip has the beat to the theme song from The OC but a rapper has made up his own lyrics to the music.

There are also parodies which is a work created to mock the producer’s original work, the subject, author, style or another target in the form of a humorous tone or imitation, these are also form’s of copyright but are not used in a serious way. A site that enables you to report copyright is Microsoft; there are two methods involved that helps you to report the piracy. One includes emailing the issue to Microsoft or filling out forms over the internet. It also states that if you have found pirated Microsoft products to report it by providing location details, contact details and the business name. (Microsoft)

If you are caught copying someone else’s material there may be serious penalties these include you being sued by the copyright owner or taken to court, the court order can range to either pay compensation or pay the copyright owner’s costs. In some serious cases you can be charged by the police with a criminal record or taken to jail.

To be fined it is when you infringe copyright by using someone else’s work without their permission, unless it’s a special exception, also using a part of their work can also infringe copyright, even if you change or add what you use you could still be crossing the barrier and may be charged. (Australian Copyright Council, 2010) I believe that it is not acceptable to copy software programs, information; videos etc in exact form but take the ideas and re-create the product in a more creative way. In conclusion I believe that copyright in a multimedia production reflects a lack of originality but reproducing an idea can be seen as creative and is highly liked among audiences. People should not steal ideas but use the information as a guide and if the ideas are used in an inappropriate way it may cause serious penalties including jail.