Copyright and Piracy

Copyright
The Copyright and Patents Act aims to protect people who invent things from having their ideas stolen.
Copyright gives originators of some types of media rights to control how they're used and distributed. Music, books, video and software can all be covered by copyright law. If you’re the sole owner of the work, you have the right to: make copies of your work; issue copies of your work; perform your work publicly through plays, films, dances or music and you can also display your work publicly through artwork or stills from audio-visual work, or any other material used on the Internet or television. Most people feel that they have the right to be paid for the work they do, that’s why we need copyright laws.
When you buy software, you don’t actually buy the software itself. You buy the right to use it, which is called a license, however, you can only use it in the way the license says you can. The three most common licences are the single user licence, multiple user licence and the site licence.
The single user licences are the most common. This licence allows you to use one copy of the software on a single computer. Sometimes they let you use it on a laptop as well, as long as both are not used at the same time. The second most common licence is the multiple user licence. These are commonly bought by companies who need lots of copies to run on a network. A 25-user licence allows them to have 25 copies of the software running and it also costs less than 25 single user licences. The third most common licence is the site licence which allows as many copies to run as the user wants as long as they are on the same site. This is common for schools to buy software such as this.
Software is expensive to buy because companies don’t make enough money from the software, and they won’t spend money on improving and developing it.

Piracy
Piracy is obtaining, make money on from, using or making changed to copyright material without earlier permission. Piracy costs over £3 billion each year in Europe; this keeps the cost of software higher for those who do pay for it. Some common types of software piracy include fake software, OEM unbundling, softlifting, hard disk loading, corporate software piracy, and Internet software piracy. Software piracy is almost impossible to stop.
The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) originated in 1984 by the software industry and is now reinforced by over 1,200 companies. It is a not-for-profit establishment with an aim to stop software piracy and has a policy of take legal action to anyone found to be breaking the copyright law. FAST also works to teach the public about good software practice and legal requirements.

Advantages on the rights of copyright
-Copyright prevents users work getting stolen or misused by other people.
-It gives the owner the right to authorize others to produce or duplicate your work as well as the right show your work.
-Copyright allows the holder of the copyright to say no to other people using their work if they find it morally irrelevant.
-The copyright policy lasts for rather a long time; this is normally around 50 years.

Disadvantages on the rights of copyright
-The failure to share work. Copyright does not allow you to agreeably permit others to use your work or to issue it, even if this isn’t for a profit.
-Authorship is not ownership. You have to own the copyright to be able to get the rights that it allows, being the creator of the work does not always guarantee ownership of the work.
-In countries such as Canada, the Canadian copyright law does not allow for parodying of work without permission.
-It takes a lot of time and effort to apply for a copyright registration.

Personal Experiences
The only experience I have to do with copyright is when I copy and paste a picture from the internet in to a piece of work I’m doing, other than that I don’t have any personal experiences when it comes to copyright and piracy. However, someone I used to know used to copyright CD’s and DVD’s but they got found out twice, the first time it was a heavy fine and the second time he got arrested for it.