Copyright

Copyright is viewed by many college students as the absolute bane of their existence. Not only must they be careful not to infringe on copyright in the realm of academia, but they are also annoyed at having to pay the $0.99 or $1.29 cents on Itunes when they could have downloaded the song for free through limewire or similar applications. In fact, these precautions are legitimate concerns. It is a federal felony to commit copyright infringement involving more than ten copies and a value of $2500; while the feds do not generally pursue prosecution, violators are often faced with civil litigation (suite by the copyright holder) and may be forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading just a couple songs illegally.

While this may be annoying, even frightening, copyright is actually a valuable policy, even for people who never copyright anything they create. By assuring that creators will be able to control the reproduction/ distribution and profit from their own creations, copyright encourages innovation and creativity, for if creators had not guarantee that they would profit from their work, they would have little incentive to conceptualize or produce anything original. Our founding fathers were actually cognizant of this; they included a law regarding copyright in Title 17 of the constitution.

The government realizes, however, that sometimes it is necessary to make copies and share them, and they created the fair use provision. This is especially applicable to the world of academics, and applies to college and graduate students in particular. It is important to understand however, that this fair use policy is liberal, but does not cover everything used for academic work. (For example, you can’t copy an entire book and pass those copies around.) The considerations in determining if the copy is legal are: (1) nature of the work (2) intended purpose (3) amount of original work being reproduced (4) the effect that reproduction has on the revenue stream of the holder.

While I may sometimes view copyright as an annoying, I am absolutely in favor of it. I know that in any civilization, innovation is integral, and I therefore support this policy. In addition, I am glad that no on can make money on anything I create unless I authorize them to do so. (For everyone is holds an automatic copyright on anything they produce, even if they do not submit their work to the copyright office or pay a fee.) Clearly, our founding fathers were on the right track.

This work by Erin Dooley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.