Mba 560 Legal Worksheet

Legal Concepts Worksheet
Concept Application of Concept to the Issue of Downloading Reference to Concept in Reading

Copyright Law
The Copyright Act of 1976 "went into effect on January 1, 1978" (Radcliffe & Brinson, 1999).  

This copyright law protects "work of authorship" (Radcliffe & Brinson, 1999).   As defined by the copyright law, these works of authorship include literary works, musical works, motion pictures and other audiovisual works, sound recordings, and much more (Radcliffe & Brinson, 1999).  

What are the procedures for getting copyright protection?   "Copyright protection arises automatically when an original work of authorship is fixed in a tangible medium of expression.   Registration with the Copyright Office is optional" (Radcliffe & Brinson, 1999).   In order to file an infringement suit, you must be registered with the Copyright Office (Radcliffe & Brinson, 1999).  

The Copyright Act of 1976 protects against the illegal distribution of music and videos.
To ensure copyright protection, you must meeting three criteria:
• "A work must be original.   It must be created, not copied" (Reed et al., 2005).
• "The work must be fixed in a tangible medium of expression like a book, canvas, compact disc, tape, or computer disk" (Reed et al., 2005)
• "The work must show some creativity. (Reed et al., 2005)

Copyright in the cyber age


Due to "the growing popularity of downloading music online in 2001, the legal battle to protect copyright was focused on the efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to challenge large
file-sharing networks like Napster. Though the RIAA won its case against Napster and effectively forced the site to shut down in 2001, a myriad of decentralized file-sharing
services emerged and millions of Internet users simply migrated to the new systems" (Madden & Lenhart, 2003).  


"Criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits for ‘file sharing' copyrighted material over the Internet are... [continues]

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