Thread: The Future of Copyright: some hopeful or scary thoughts.

Copying other people's material is common but the near future may hold some surprises. I think we need to be very careful and aware of the fact that the near or somewhat near future may hold prosecution for violations and not just civil prosecutions. As the means for locating violators is improving there are those who are thinking about gearing up for criminal prosecutions, some quite serious.

A very interesting article called 10 ways you might be breaking the law with your computer was publish May 16 on TechRepublic (but I just found it) that I think is worth our reading. It talks about anticipated criminal prosecutions for copyright issues as well as stealing services (internet access) or hacking. It can be found at:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=356

One comment from the article begins: the House of Representative recently approved by an overwhelming majority HR 4279, which imposes stricter penalties for copyright infringement. It creates a new position of “copyright enforcement czar” in the federal bureaucracy and gives law enforcement agents the right to seize property from copyright infringers.

Interesting, don't you think. Things may get better. Or, things may get worse. (Better the devil you know than the one you don't.) But either way it is interesting.

My recommendation. Be cautious. Be safe. Be original. It is easy to forget where you get stuff over time.

Wow, great find James!

this is really important James, thanks

Probably one of the things that I found out years ago, that I wasn't aware of, was how much stuff is actually copyrighted! Newbies should be extremely careful, when copying images, etc. It's real easy to search Google Images, copy one and put into your own website, without doing ones homework first.

good information thank's
I also was looking into the copyright stuff it is interesting