Free and easy that's how we like it

For this week's reading we touched upon the topic of copyrights as well as a few of it related topics. Now honestly, when I was still schooling I have no idea what is copyright and I'm sure that majority of us used to copy and paste information from the internet onto our project paper.

Now that we are in college/university we are introduced to the harsh reality of copyright and plagiarism. Actually we are more on the plagiarism side rather than the copyright. It is as stated by John W Snapper that there is a huge difference between copyright and plagiarism. While both are very similar, but they are both rather different as well. To put it simply, piracy is an infringement of copyright and plagiarism is the failure to give credit to others for their work

Plagiarism as it is what all our lecturers have always warned us not to do is usually referred in an academic or scholarly sense. That when were to hand up a report or research we would have to cite and reference those whose works that we have used and copied ( a bit not the whole thing). But it is a bigger concern today for academic scholar due to fact that the internet can now provide information as well. Take for example Wikipedia, type anything and it will or probably will have an article of what you are looking for. It's easy and is free, rather then you have to go down to the library and spend time searching for a book only to find out that it has been borrowed and won't be back for another say 2 years. But here is the big concern about getting information of the net, and it is how credible is the information? Sure maybe that information was taken from a journal or a research from someone but we can not be 100% be sure of it because if there is no reference than it may not be credible and the person who published that info on the net had just plagiarize someone else work.

Plagiarism aside, it is the Copyright who plays a much more bigger role in the world. We probably have heard a lot of copyright infringement cases already, in fact we ourselves should be arrested for illegally downloading movies, songs, games and etc. Copyright piracy harms the copyright owner. The harm is almost always viewed as a crime against property. The most common harm is the victim’s loss of revenue from unauthorized copying. Just a couple of years back when the internet wasn't too much of a hit in Malaysia then, people we selling pirated VCD and DVD for rm5 and rm8 respectively whereas the original would cost more, with the advancement of technology one can sneak a camcorder into a cinema to record (poor quality) film or easily rip the original disc using softwares, fast forward copyright has became a bigger is issue then said 20 years ago, today we can easily just download something off the net for free or watch it off the net for free. Heck, even getting the source code for free and then published the game as an offline game or a private server game.

This is all very good for the public indeed, but bad for the people who made all those. Is not cheap making a summer blockbuster transformers 3 or even the latest final fantasy XIII. Probably cost them millions to produce those but we are resorting to cheap pirated equivalent to the original. As technology becomes more advance they start to create loop holes onto the already established laws of copyrights. And we have seen some taking the steps to make sure their works are not illegally copied, example Sony and their newest game console the Playstation 3 is probably the only console that out there that people are still trying to find ways to hack in, in order to play pirated games.

But this also leads to another question, if so you are able to make it impossible for people to copy your work illegally or hacked or jailbreak. Will it affect the economy? From a simple observation in Malaysia alone, when news about the PS3 not being able to play pirated games made it the least most desired console by many, and they turn to Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 as two are still able to play pirated games (they are still using DVD, while PS3 uses Blu Ray).

All in all, personally I feel that copyright laws is a must and should be reinforced to protect the creations and ideas of those who own them. Realistically this seems impossible thanks to the advent of technology, and since illegal download, duplication and copying are happening at such ungodly speed, it would take the company forever to track down every individual. Maybe in future they could come up with a feature that can track down people who tries to make copies of the disc, it can trigger when a ripping process occurs. We have to start realizing that piracy is does bot do us much good as we are branding ourselves as thief as well.