Intellectual property rights and copyrights

With the increase in the number of people downloading movies, television shows and songs on the internet, we hear a lot about copyright in the news, as well as the the fact that all those materials are protected and that you need to pay a license or a small fee to be able to have the movie or song legally.



You can find on various different sites like Wikipedia or Copyrightware.co.uk the exact definition of the words like copyright or intellectual property rights, but below is a quick summary of what it is all about.

Basically, the copyright is a protection of something created by a person or company to prevent the creation from being copied, or used in any way without authorization from the person or company that owns the creation. Usually, a copyright exists for a certain time, in most cases, for the duration of the creator's lifetime with an additional seventy years. This means that only a few films are now available for free. Sites offering to watch movies online for free will usually have those films on their sites as part of their services. Without these copyrights, the creators of movies, television shows or songs would not be able to get anything from their work and generate incomes from it as they would be copied and redistributed without their consent and especially without giving them money for the work done.

Intellectual property rights can be considered as variety of different protections. For example, a copyright is an intellectual property right. Patents also a form of intellectual property rights. All those property rights exist to protect the inventors of a machine or the creators of images, films and so on. The rights can be owned by somebody and also licensed for use to somebody. We hear very often that records companies or people for instance buy the rights of an artist or a music band. One famous example is that Michael Jackson had bought the rights of some of the beetles' songs. As a result when those songs where bought or used, he received money for it.



As a result, it is important to emphasis that anybody being caught downloading a film or a song illegally can be sued by the license owner of the material downloaded. It is considered a civil offence. You may think that all those big companies already have a lot of money and that it is just right to not give them some for a change but did you ever consider all the people having a job thanks to that money directly when they work for artists or record companies or indirectly when they are contractors, and the fact that not having it would put them out of jobs. Those people could be you and me.