Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 GCSE ICT Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

You record a demo of it and send it to a record company, but you don't hear anything from them. How does it make you feel when you see the latest boy band performing your song on Top of the Pops, and you haven't been paid a single penny for it? It's not fair is it? That's why we need a law to protect the author of any original material from someone else taking it and claiming it as their work. There is such a law, it is called the 'Copyright, Designs and Patents Act' and it was passed in 1988.

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 This Act was introduced to protect the investment of time, money and effort by the people who create original pieces of work. This can mean authors of books, composers of music, the makers of a film, a computer game designer or a company that creates applications such as word processing software. They all invest a great deal of time and money to produce these things and quite rightly, their work belongs to them.

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act has two main purposes: To ensure people are rewarded for their endeavours. To give protection to the copyright holder if someone tries to copy or steal their work.

Copyright and ICT As you have seen, the Act protects a wide range of work, both written and computer based. We are more concerned here with the ICT examples. Some of these are: Copying software Copying or downloading music Copying images or photographs from the web Copying text from web pages and using it in your work or posting it onto your website and pretending it is your own work.

Software Licences When you purchase a piece of software you don't actually own the software. What you are buying is a licence to be able to use the software. You are able to load your software onto your machine at home and use it for as long as you like. You are not however, allowed to take it to your mates and load it onto his computer - he doesn't have a licence to use it.

Myths " I didn't know so I'm not guilty“ You won't get way with saying ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know’. If you copy things and pass them off as your own, you are guilty of breaching Copyright.. "If it doesn't have a copyright notice, it is not copyrighted." Nope, you won't get away with this one either. Any original work is copyright, whether it has a copyright notice on or not. If something looks copyright then you should assume that it is.

"If I don't charge for it, I can copy it’ False. It doesn't matter if you charge someone or not, copying is copying, whichever way you look at it. Breaking the copyright laws can result in very heavy penalties - you can get a hefty fine and even get sent to jail!

Does it matter? How many of the following are you guilty of? Copying a computer game from your mate Downloading a few tracks from the internet - they are free aren't they Copying text from a website and pasted it into your own work Come on, if we tell the truth, I bet we have all done these things. But does it really matter?

It is estimated that almost 40% of software is copied It is estimated that almost 40% of software is copied. This has a huge impact on the software industry. By just cutting the software piracy rate from 25% to 15% would result in an extra 40,000 jobs in the IT sector and an extra £2.5 billion in tax revenues. The extra revenue that software companies would receive would mean that they could reinvest more into new product development, perhaps a new game or a new application package.

It’s estimated, in fact, that people breaking the law and downloading copyrighted music costs the industry something like £8.5 billion a year – and loses £1.5 billion for the VAT man. So, the end result, if everybody that has a PC in the UK decided to download ripped off music rather than buy it, would be an end to the music industry in the UK.

A new and growing concern is the large amount of 'instant essays' or even full pieces of coursework now readily available for purchase over the internet. Exam boards and universities are clamping down on this and have had to put in place sophisticated monitoring systems to ensure that a student is handing in their own work. One university student recently failed his degree when the university caught him cheating after he submitted a dissertation that he had purchased from the Internet. Exam boards will instantly disqualify you if they catch students trying to submit work which is not their own.