5.+My+report

 My Report //Report: The use of digital data covered by Copyright in a multimedia production reflects a lack of creativity and is against the law in all circumstances. Discuss//

Copyright is an important issue in today’s society. It has some good and bad issues facing the multimedia productions, which are covered by copyright. There have been a variety of laws introduced that are concerned with the use of digital data and copyright.

Firstly, what is copyright? Copyright is something that protects people’s ideas (Government, Australian). It is for free and can be used to keep all of your work safe. Copyright is designed to prevent people from stealing your original ideas and work (Australian Government, 2008). Some of the organizations that help with copyright are non-profitable. The Australian Copyright Council is one of these non-profitable organizations (Australian Copyright Council).

Copyright only covers certain components of multimedia. These components include text, video, animation, music, images and hypertext. There are many reasons why copyright is important for the components of multimedia. One of these reasons is to allow workers to know that their work will be protected by copyright (Brinson, 1999). It also allows the creator to know that their work won’t be stolen without breaking the Copyright Law.

The law that copyright uses will only allow you to copy twenty-five percent of someone else’s work. So if someone wants to have certain components of multimedia from someone else’s work they can only copy twenty-five percent of that work. If they were to copy more than the allowed amount of work then they would be breaking the copyright law.

Software authors need to be protected by copyright because anyone could go and steal the author’s work and say that it's their idea. Having copyright allows the software authors to know that nobody is able to steal work without breaking the law.

Software piracy has become a large cost to the Australian computer industry. It was recorded that in 2005 there was $446 million lost through software piracy (Software piracy rates and the BSAA). This is a large amount of money to be losing each year. In Australia twenty-six percent of computer software is pirated. The pirated software is what causes this large amount of money to be lost. The result of software piracy isn't a very good one. Due to the amount of software piracy it has become a very serious problem. Because of this happening, it could prevent new software productions.

One Australian company that tries to reduce software piracy is the Business Software Association of Australia also known as BSAA. This company tries to protect work by educating people (Australian Competition and Consmer Commission, 2009). BSAA tries to reduce the amount of software piracy by giving a reward which is money, to people that report anything helpful about software piracy (A Solution to Reduce Software Piracy). The technology that this company uses is tracking people who use the pirated software.

Personally I don't think that it is right to copy software without the permission of the author. I think this because you’re doing something illegal. Another reason is that the software is downloaded for free and the author of the software won't get as much profit for designing the software.

There are also legal issue surrounding software and the Internet. Most of these issues are about the amounts of digital data that is being downloaded illegally. There are many sites that can be used to download all types of different software. There are a variety of sites to download different types of software. The types of software which can be found in these types of sites include MP4 Converter, Photoshop, Microsoft Office and Adobe are just a few of these software programs.

The use of digital data covered by copyright in a multimedia production reflects a lack of creativity and is against the law in all circumstances. This is a very true fact because copying someone else’s ideas shows that you are lacking creativity. However, some people could disagree and say that it’s not lacking creativity.

In my opinion, I think that copyright is a good idea. I strongly think this for many reasons. One of these reasons if that if there wasn’t copyright, then it would be harder for people to know if you are using your own work and ideas or someone else’s. Another reason that I believe copyright is a good idea is for school and universities. It can be used for marking students work, such as assignments. This will show how much the student wants to get a good grade or, if the student lacks creativity and doesn’t know how to turn someone else’s work into his or her own.

Having copyright makes sure that the authors of the multimedia components will still get profit. This is important because if there is no profit for the author then there could be fewer amounts of multimedia components being produced.

Certain people have different opinions. Others may think that having copyright as part of the law isn’t a good thing. Copyright can cause large amounts of people illegally copying work and they may not even realise that they are.

Without copyright people could be happily downloading music or even videos for free. If this were to happen nobody would have to bother with going to the shop and physically buying it. If this were the case, then students also wouldn’t have to think about changing the information being used on assignments into their own words.

If something like this were to happen then there wouldn’t be any point of there being cinemas, bookstores and a variety of other stores because slowly people wouldn’t want to buy the multimedia aspects. Instead they could just download them. I think that this is wrong. Copyright is worth having in today’s society, even though it may be hard for some people to follow all of the aspects that copyright wants us to follow.

In conclusion, I personally think that copyright covering the aspects of multimedia is a good thing to have. Even though there are both good and bad issues with copyright it is helpful for those who want to publish their work but also have it protected.