COPYRIGHT INDUSTRY AND RESPONSE TO DIGITAL AND ONLINE INFRINGEMENT; UK AND USA EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Digital media exist in hard forms, such as CDs, CD-ROMs and DVDs, and the ease and accuracy of this technology has led to a great spate of piratical copying. This same danger for the record, film and publishing industries arise on the internet, where hard copy ceases to be the major means of transmission. This paper makes the assertion that the United Kingdom copyright industries are insisting that they are under considerable threat, and are looking to see what potential the new internet world, which appears as a right, have in store for them. It makes further assertion that the enhanced ability to copy and distribute information triggered by the internet has provoked responses; and - being that electronic management may give them control over their works with far greater precision than used to follow from traditional copyright, which infringement occurred only at points of manufacture, sale rental and specified public use. To implement the rules and laws of WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT) regarding copyright infringement over internet, the United States in moving the nation’s copyright law into the digital age, in October 1998, adopted a local Copyright Act named the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This work therefore seeks to consider the potential of the internet to restrict access for every use desired by a consumer, if users can only get to the material by a password, a decryption device or some other barrier, and if the material can be controlled after access as well. This relationship can be the subject of a range of contractual conditions, precisely modulated, and consumers will get much more exactly what they pay for. Such a result sounds the very model of economic efficiency.