Copyright

Jason Hardin, the manager of Access Services at Trinity, came to speak to our class on Wednesday about copyright issues and laws. He seemed well-informed on the topic, and I feel that I learned a lot that I didn’t know before. I didn’t realize how long copyright has been in existence—since 1790! It is even written into the Constitution, so the U.S. has been protecting our “intellectual property” since the very beginning of its existence. Copyright stimulates work and encourages intellectual creativeness and development of new arts and sciences. People who create something new usually put a lot of time and effort into their product, so I do think copyright is necessary for most cases so no one else can take credit for their idea. However, I believe that copyrighted material should be allowed to be used for all academic purposes, as long as it is not used for profitable gain and credit is given to the author. Also, I think that the RIAA, MPAA and ESA specifically targeting college students is ridiculous. Copyright protects the songwriters and singers, and I do think that downloading songs without paying for them is stealing and breaking the law, but suing a broke college student for tens of thousands of dollars for a few songs is just unreasonable. Maybe a lesser consequence should be established, depending on how many songs were actually illegally obtained.