As technology changes and with the digital age upon us, the laws that govern society have also had to evolve to maintain order within these emerging and diverse facets of our society. The Copyright Act 1968 gives owners of copyright exclusive rights to do certain things with their materials (Copyright Agency Limited) and it can be said that all materials found on the internet are protected by copyright. At present, a range of different materials are all protected under copyright law on the internet including the following:-
All original works are protected by copyright.
The protection lasts for a duration of about 50 years following the death of the creator of the works. Protection of original items on the internet was formally in effect through the passing of the Copyright Amendment (Digital) Act 2000.
Acts including the printing of material from an internet website, material cut and pasted from another person’s website into your own etc are all violations of copyright laws. Permission must be sought from the webmaster or the author of the works before the website material is used. (Copyright Agency Limited, 2004).
The Copyright Amendment (Digital) Act 2000 (Cth) was enacted in 2001 to give authors of internet works copyright over their original creations.
In order to ensure that copyright infringements are lessened, the authors must also take it upon themselves to protect their works further from violations though the implementation of the following steps:-
It should however, be noted that there is no guarantee that copyright of internet works will not be infringed as it is difficult to control and monitor the use made of works posted on the internet. With various works being made available to the general public in an environment that is not entirely secure, and subsequently of difficulty to monitor the use of works on the world wide web, the only consolation available to the authors is their right to instigate litigation proceedings against those who take the steps to purposefully infringe upon their rights as authors and copyright owners of their works.
An equally important area of note in copyright and intellectual property law is that of computer programs as many of the people and the organizations that are creating the computer programs and software deem “any use made of their software without permission to be unfair and that all unauthorized use ought to be made illegal�. (Bott et al, 1995). However, in this day and age, the task of monitoring the uses of technology would prove to be near impossible, as while there are notable advances made with regards to technology, there are many advances being made to copy and pirate it. An example of this would be DVD home burning). McKeough & Stewart have also raised this point in that “technology… has been a double-edged sword, because the same advances have occurred in relation to copying techniques, making it easier for piracy to take place… the very medium of computer data storage lends itself to unauthorized access and copying�. Some questions have been raised with regards to concerns surrounding the copyright of computer programs including:
Perhaps the true test to see if the current laws that govern the areas of copyright and intellectual property laws in the digital age is that of time.
