Canadas Copyright Law
Canadas Copyright LawCanada's copyright law is one of our hardest laws to enforce. The reason the police have so much trouble enforcing this law, is due to technology. This law is very easy to break, and once broken, it is very hard to track down violators. So although some form of a copyright law is needed, the one we have has, too many holes to be effective. There are three main ways in which the copyright law is broken in everyday life. They is audio/video tape copying, plagiarism, and software piracy. The first, and most commonly violated aspect of the copyright law, is the copying of audio tapes for oneself and friends. Thanks to the invention of dual cassette stereos, this has become very easy. You simply take an original or even another copy of a tape, as well as a blank tape. Stick them both in to the stereo and bingo you have a new tape. You also just broke the law. Along with copying audio tapes, now we can copy video tapes almost as easily. If you hook two VCR's together, they can copy from one to the other. You could rent a movie form the video store, copy and return it, with no one the wiser. The problem with copying video and audio tapes is that for every copy you make the recording artist, the actors, producers and everyone else who collect royalties from the tapes lose money. If the companies start to lose money, they raise prices. Thus a vicious circle begins. As prices go up, fewer people buy original copies. If less people buy the original cassettes prices will once again rise. Another major form of piracy is plagiarism. The stealing of someone elses ideas or work. The biggest category of people who fall into here are students. Very often a student when doing a research paper will "accidently" forget to footnote his work. By "forgetting" to give the author credit, the student has claimed the work as his own. Another reason students may copy someone else's work is to sound more sophisticated hoping that if they use someone elses words it will sound better than their own. Generally, this provides an easy way for a teacher or the police to catch them. Teachers also plagiarize rather frequently. Very often a teacher will photocopy several pages from a book, in order to save the students the expense of having to buy the book for themselves. While this is a noble act by the teacher, in most cases, this is illegal. Unless...
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