Post 2: Ethics of Digital Technology

Task 1: Define and describe Copyright, Creative Commons and Piracy.

Copyright

What is copyright? Copyright is license that protects your work from being used privately or commercially. This means that the can't use or edit your work for redistribution or ownership nonetheless they as for permission from you. For example, you make a soundtrack which attracts a lot of people in the internet. If you don't want anyone to take your work and claim it as their own (plagiarist) you must put a copyright license on the soundtrack and make sure that no one copies or manipulates your work. If someone does breach the copyright law then you can report them and the owner of the site will have to take it down and ban the plagiarist from the website. If you want to use someone's work either for work or a school project then you must ask the copyright holder (owner) for permission. The Copyright act was made in 1994 and was reprinted in 1st January 2014. Basically the Copyright act gives copyright owners protection of their work.

What rights do owner's have?
The Copyright Act 1994 gives copyright owners protection of their work.

What rights do user's have?
The Copyright Act seeks to provide a balance between the interests of authors, owners and users of copyright material.

There are educational, library, research, and review exceptions in the Copyright Act.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons are set of licenses that protect the copyright holder's of original content. These licences show everyone how they can use/manipulate their work. You can apply for a license on your work to protect it from people who might redistribute it. You can apply for different licenses which are different from each other

 There are 6 Creative Commons license. 

     These are:

Attribution

This licence lets other people to distribute, remix tweak and build upon your work, even commercially as long as they credit you for the original work.

Attribution-Non Commercial 

This licence lets other people remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially with credit to you(new works must also be non-commercial). Attribution-Sharealike 

This licence lets other people remix, tweak and build upon your work even commercially. As long as they credit you for the work and licence  their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-Non Commercial-Sharealike 

This licence lets other people remix, tweak and build upon your work non commercially, as long as they credit your for your work and licence their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-No Derivatives 

This licence allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 

This license only allows other people to download your works and share  them with others as long as they credit you, but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially.

Piracy

What is piracy? Piracy is the illegal reproduction and/or distribution of any copyrighted material through the internet. A good example of Piracy is making copies of a movie that is protected with copyright. The most common incident of Piracy was the raid of the Kim Dotcom mansion. Kim Dotcom was the owner of the famous fileshare website called "Megaupload" which was shutdown by the FBI in January 19 2012 because of copyright infringement. Getting caught doing piracy will lead to fines that may cost thousands of dollars.

Most people have downloaded illegal files on the internet mostly music, movies or games. What they don't know is that they can get a strike for downloading pirated files. Once they have reached 3 strikes, they will get a fine by their internet provider.

Task 2: Next you need to discuss how each of these legal, ethical and moral considerations are related

These 3 things are common because Copyright protects your work from being used privately or commercially. In order to allow other people to change or use your work you must apply for a Creative Commons licence that fits your requirements. If someone does use or change your work illegally then they are breaking the copyright laws which is Piracy

Task 3: Next you need to write a brief case study on the controversy surrounding the online file sharing/storage service Megaupload and the new file service mega.co.nz

Kim Dotcom breached the copyright laws by allowing his users to upload anything including copyright protected files. Kim Dotcom failed to check what each individual user has uploaded which lead to the copyright law breach. After a year Kim Dotcom launched a new filesharing website called "Mega" which is similar to Megaupload but different. Mega is different because your data is encrypted and decrypted  during transfer by your devices only which means Mega can't access your files. When Megaupload was shutdown seven people were charged with online piracy crimes including Kim Dotcom and his brothers. Both Megaupload and Mega had a main purpose of storing files. They both store your personal files without letting anyone but you to access them. Other sites like Mediafire, Rapidshare 4shared and etc. works pretty much the same as Megaupload but they haven't been charged with copyright breaches which questions the FBI of their main purpose of only targeting Megaupload instead of other filesharing websites