Copright

COPYRIGHT

 
So the class session for this week focused on copyright and todaysmeet. Admittedly I was a bit confused in the beginning as to why we were having a lesson on Copyright. As to date, we have been doing a lot of exciting practical’s in class. Then 👀👀👀, I came to realise that we have been taught so much on how to publish things on the internet, that’s its by time that we needed to be educated about how to protect, manage and own the things that we are putting out there on the web. So then … it all made sense then, to learn about ‘copyright’. So what is copyright? (to me it means that it’s like oxygen, it’s all around us but we are not bothered much about it, we do not know the intricates  involved). So allow me the opportunity to Enlighten you (or at least let me try to).
 

 

Copyright is a legal right that somebody has over the work that they have done. It is created by the law of a country that grants the original creator of a specific piece of work, their exclusive rights over it, for its use and distribution. However, it is not forever, there is a time period attached. That being of the time of the publisher till 50 years after the death of the publisher.

South Africa, as many other countries across the globe has a copyright law that protects the publishers work. It is the Copyright Act of 1978 and it amending Acts.

The history behind Copyright is that it was first introduced in the 18 century (that’s a long time ago) with the invention of the printing press. A man by the name of Charles ll of England was concerned about the unsupervised distribution of books by making mass copies of them. In a response to stop this and to regulate it the Licensing of the Press Act 1662 came into being.

Copyright laws allows the creators of books, journal articles, movies, music and arts to be protected and not sold off as someone else’s invention.

I think that in our community, we are not fully aware of what copyright entails and how it should be applied. We often buy pirated D.V.D.’s for R10 per disc and we do not have a moral conscious about it. Also, we can access information so quickly over our laptops, i-pods and smartphones that we often take what we need (download music, movies and songs) without realising that we are at fault. (You see what I mean by its like oxygen … so in a nutshell that’s my explanation).