Copyrights and Copylefts: Their Role in Today's Technological Age And How They Interact with the Internet.The Internet is an enigma, constantly shaping and reshaping itself on an almost instantaneous cycle. Every day, new ideas are created, new topics are discussed, and new images, eBooks, fan fictions, etc. are uploaded to the World Wide Web. However, one thing that has always been a problem is the use of Copyrights. For those who don't know, a copyright is, in essence, a legal acknowledgement stating that one or more parties owns an intellectual property. A perfect example of this would be like if I wanted to make a walk-through of a Legend of Zelda video game, I would not (under any circumstance) be able to say that I owned the rights to the actual game. It is essentially this: You cannot claim that you own the rights to a property that you don't actually own.
There have, however, been steps taken to lessen the burden of legal issues stemming from the copyright monolith. One such step is in the form of the Creative Commons, which is a database of music, video, audio and the like that is free for use to the open public. These help give those who want to do things, but are unsure if what they're using is leaving them open to lawsuits, the perfect way to express their ideas and convey their messages. However, there are times where Creative Commons just don't work, especially with media sharing sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and so on. For that, there is what is known as the Fair Use law. Just like what Stanford University states on their website, "Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism." An example of this is someone making a music montage using clips from a television show and overlaying a specific song over the video.
Now how does this really impact the internet? Well, it impacts the Internet tremendously. So much so that, during the proposals for two separate anti-piracy laws called SOPA and PIPA, there was a huge uproar against it (though it mostly went by practically unnoticed by the major media groups). Officially noted to have the intended purpose of stoping the illegal distribution of copyrighted material on the internet, the bills were actually designed to essentially allow companies to issue cease-and-desist orders against anyone for posting, uploading, or even mentioning a product, in some cases, of media (an example incident would be with Sega flagging videos of the video game Shining Force III on YouTube)! The bills were, ultimately, voted against. But the overlooming shadow of having a person's ability to speak their mind on the internet would be their greatest ally Since the laws , both bills have yet to be reintroduced to Congress and the Senate.
What do I think of the copyright dilemma? I believe that the Internet is fine where it is in terms of copyrights and their usage. Sure there will be times where people file lawsuits against others who go and break the laws of copyright , but a small part of the actual Internet user-base does not make up the Internet community as a whole. Instead, the fact that we have Creative Commons works floating in existence and the Fair Use law allows us leeway into making user-edited or user-created content.
