Copyright Law

The copyright law is there to prevent people stealing other people's work and using it as their own. It's like if someone stole your coursework and took your grade for it. The law clamps down on this and prevents people copying all sorts, from software, to music, to the coursework that you had to type on your computer that got hacked into and stolen.

The act has two main purposes:

1. To make sure people are rewarded for their endeavors.
2. To give protection to the copyright holder if someone tries to copy or steal their work.

Nearly everyone is guilty of copyright in some sense. Copying text from a site; installing your friends computer game on your own PC to play; downloading free music, we've all done it. But is it OK? Are these just petty examples and exempt from the law?

In computing software alone, a 10% decrease in piracy would result in 40000 new jobs and an extra £2.5 billion in tax for the government to do more with. Thsi could mean more games for us to play, or new software to use designed with the extra cash we are taking away by piracy.

If a student is caught trying to submit copied work, the exam boards will automatically disquallify them from the course, resulting in a fail.

Software you buy in he shop is not owned by you. It is merely a single-user license sold to you that allows you to install and run that software on your computer. It does not allow you to install that same software on your friends computer. Places like schools can buy muli-user licenses that allow them to have as many people as stated to use the software at oncce, or a site license that allows as many poeple as they like to use the software on the site.