COPYRIGHT

During last class, Josh Hardin from the library came and gave us a presentation about copyrighting and its history and why it is used. Copyrighting got started in 1790, the year the constitution was ratified, predating the Bill of Rights-showing its importance to our country. It was important because the whole issue came down to money, and if something you do is not copyrighted, then anyone else can take it and use it as their own, and possibly make money over it. The terms for copyright are its the authors birthday plus 70 years. The law used to be the authors birthday plus 50 years, but that was changed when the death of Walt Disney came around, and the company feared losing their copyright on all the characters and stories he had created, so they petitioned the government to change the law and won. We also learned some scary aspects of copyright, like the federal government defines copyright as making at least 10 copies of something at a value of $2,500, and also that everything someone does on the Internet is track able back to them. On college campuses, there are hundreds of students every day that receive notices regarding copyright infringement from things such as file sharing.

COPYRIGHT by Zia Lunden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.