Canada's Copyright Laws

Canada's copyright law is one of our hardest laws to enforce.

The reason the police have so much trouble enforcing this law, is due

to technology. This law is very easy to break, and once broken, it is

very hard to track down violators. So although some form of a

copyright law is needed, the one we have has, too many holes to be

effective. There are three main ways in which the copyright law is

broken in everyday life. They is audio/video tape copying,

plagiarism, and software piracy.

The first, and most commonly violated aspect of the copyright

law, is the copying of audio tapes for oneself and friends. Thanks to

the invention of dual cassette stereos, this has become very easy.

You simply take an original or even another copy of a tape, as well as

a blank tape. Stick them both in to the stereo and bingo you have a

new tape. You also just broke the law.

Along with copying audio tapes, now we can copy video tapes

almost as easily. If you hook two VCR's together, they can copy from

one to the other. You could rent a movie form the video store, copy

and return it, with no one the wiser.

The problem with copying video and audio tapes is that for

every copy you make the recording artist, the actors, producers and

everyone else who collect royalties from the tapes lose money. If the

companies start to lose money, they raise prices. Thus a vicious

circle begins. As prices go up, fewer people buy original copies. If

less people buy the original cassettes prices will once again rise.

Another major form of piracy is plagiarism. The stealing of

someone elses ideas or work. The biggest category of people who fall

into here are students. Very often a student when doing a research

paper will "accidently" forget to footnote his work. By "forgetting"

to give the author credit, the student has claimed the work as his

own. Another reason students may copy someone else's work is to sound

more sophisticated hoping that if they use someone elses words it will

sound better than their own. Generally, this provides an easy way for

a teacher or the police to catch them.

Teachers also plagiarize rather frequently. Very often a

teacher will photocopy several pages from a book, in order to save the

students the expense of having to buy the book for themselves. While

this is a noble act by the teacher, in most cases, this is illegal.

Unless the author of the book, gave consent for his/her work to be

freely distributed, teachers can't copy it anymore than students or

anyone else can.

The third category of piracy is Software Pirating. There are

several forms which this can take. The most common form is very

similar to audio/video cassettes. It is when someone copies a game or

program from his/her computer to someone elses. As long as the two

people have the same type of computer, (they both have apples or

IBM's) this is a very simple process, so long as the programmer didn't