Task One
What Copyright means.
Copyright is the legal right that the owner of the work has, meaning the owner has created or made the work. They are entitled to their own work meaning no one else can copy and use your work without your permission, The only way others can use your work is if they ask you for permission to use it and you say yes.
Rights that the copyright owners have.
Copyright owners have the right to copy their own work, sell copies of their work, have their work performed, played, or shown in public. The owner of the work could also make adaptations to their work and authorize others to do things with it. Countries has different copyright rules. For example in USA it is legal for South Park to take other peoples characters and have them in an episode because they have making a parody of that character. Copyright laws is very different in different counties because they all have different laws.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is an organization that allows others to share their work without the laws of copyright in their hands. For example if you were on creative commons and you saw a picture that you like, you can just copy it without having to ask the owner of the work if you could copy it, because the owner had put that there for everyone else to use.
The 6 different licenses of Creative Commons
- Attribution
- Attribution ShareAlike
- Attribution NoDerivs
- Attribution Non commercial
- Attribution Non commercial-ShareAlike
- Attribution Non commercial-NoDerivs
Piracy
The word piracy means taking work from other people that they have created and distributing it. Users download illegally because they don't want to pay for item e.g games,movies,music etc. This means that the owner of the work is not being paid.
Task Two
Copyright, Creative Commons and Piracy has quiet a few things in common. For example if a work has copyright license on it, people may not copy that piece of work without your permission, however if they do copy it without your permission it is considered piracy. Whereas with Creative Commons you can download whatever is there but you must refer to the creator of the work and if you don't it would also be considered piracy.
Task Three
MegaUpload and Mega
KimDotCom was the creator of MegaUpload. MegaUpload copyright laws has been breached because people from all around the world had been uploading files such as movies, games, music etc. which is considered piracy. MegaUpload had many special features such as buying premium membership, buying premium membership gives you advantages such as having multiple downloads, higher downloading speed. Another interesting thing that MegaUpload had was the rewarding system. The way that the rewarding system worked is; every time someone downloads a file that you've uploaded, you will receive 1 point, once you've collected enough points you can exchange your points for either premium-ship or real life money (USD). MegaUpload was so popular that so many people were uploading and downloading files and just about everyone was breaking the laws of copyright which led to the shutdown of the website because it was unethical.
KimDotCom was also the creator of Mega. Mega strangely enough is almost exactly like MegaUpload, people are uploading files containing movies, games, music etc. which is considered piracy as well. But, why is Mega not being taken down you may ask? Mega uses encryption keys on the all the files meaning only the uploader knows what the file contains. KimDotCom does not know what the file contains because he does not have the encryption key to decrypted it. Because of this of this Kim isn't illegibly attained to any of the files and the uploader is. Kim is just a web host and isn't liable for the files because he does not know whats in them, neither do those trying to get the website taken down, and because of this there is no proof that there is any piracy going on Mega. So they can not claim that Mega is unethical.
References
www.legislation.govt.nz
www.creativecommons.org.nz
