Copyright

Copyright Regulations

 

Right after Johannes Gutenberg invented the mechanical printing, the copyright became an issue. People who wrote and printed news, fiction, actually anything, had nothing that prohibited other people to use their intellectual property and propagate it as their own. Most widely known form music and other works of art, plagiarism increased and regulations were needed to harness the new form of abuse.

In the seventeenth Century, the British King Charles II started it all with his first ever law regarding copyright, it just wasn't called that way, it was called the Licensing Act.

 

The first true predecessor to the United States' coined copyright law would be the British Statute of Anne from the early eighteenth Century, where the financial benefit was regulated as belonging to the author, which is very similar to the copyright law of today, which actually regulates only the money, not the intellectual property.

It was Victor Hugo who pushed for the proclamation and finally the worldwide acceptance of the Berne Convention, a bilateral agreement on an international level. It is this convention which is, with updates and modern implementations, still valid for most of the world, except the United States, who did sign on to it, but complicated the matter silly.

The copyright regulations of the United States are so complicated that now in the United States a new breed of attorneys has emerged, the copyright attorneys. These brave individuals took it upon themselves to enter the jungle of copyright law and regulations and learn all the countless paragraphs and bylaws, know everything about past and current copyright related cases and become experts in a field as of yet not known to man: the copyright regulations world.

What may read like a romance novel or a movie with Johnny Depp, where pirates find ways to outsmart government officials and rich moguls by providing something they heavily charge for completely free, is actually not a modern spin on Robin Hood, but serious hunting of seemingly regular people by faceless industry behemoths aided by agencies and corporations as well as governments. What is actually closer to a witch hunt, where teenagers and grandmothers get jailed for downloading a mp3 file and where raids are made to seize computers and not drugs or arms, finally comes down to one and just one conclusion.

 

Rich people want to get richer, big companies want to become huge and if you don't have the money to buy the goods, then don't download them, or you will be prosecuted to the extreme extent of the law. Ridiculous, isn't it?

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