Copyright: Should Copyright Penalties Be Tougher?

Have you heard the term copyright? I think yes, but you may be wonder what it means or what it does. Copyright is a form to protect your work against plagiarism or any kind of misuse. But should copyright penalties be tougher? My answer is no. Tougher laws won’t solve the problems that copyright is fighting in today’s world, like piracy. Increasing the penalties will only make the problem bigger. Like Oscar Wilde said: “the best way to get rid of temptation is drooped into it.” This means that people will infringe copyright no matter what.

To understand the infringement of copyright better we first need to know what it is. As I mentioned before, copyright is a protection that the United States Copyright Act of 1976 provides to authors of original works. When the work is created it immediately is secured with copy right, although the registration of your work in the copyright office is recommended. Works after January 1, 1978, are protected from the moment they were created for the author’s life plus 70 year after the author’s death. Anonymous works or pseudonym works are only protected from 90 to 120 years, which is less time. The copyright is represented with the symbol ©, the letter C inside a circle. Penalties for copyright are from $250 to

These limits are known as fair use, which is a list of terms that state when people can use a copyrighted work. A good example of this is when someone buys a CD of music, you might think well he can use this music to make a video, or use it, because he bought it. Fair use states no, he can’t use it. But are those limits really for every one? I think no; some authors publish their works under creative commons (free of fair use limits), so the public can use their works in any purpose. Just like the public domain. This fair use and the copyright act only work for those big companies that earn millions of dollars per year, leaving copyright just as a right for few