Copyright Law Day

The notion of copyright originally only applied to books. The first copyright statute ever made was the British Statute of Anne 1710. As far back as almost 250 years ago, in 1787, the United States Constitution protected copyrights in order to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

Even back then, the intent of copyright is to promote the creation of new works by giving authors control of and profit from them with copyrights usually being territorial, meaning they did not extend beyond the territory of a specific state unless that state was a party to an international agreement. Today, however, which territory or even country people and create live in is not quite as important as it was in the past, as most countries agree on most aspects of standardized copyright laws.

Normally, a copyright lasts all throughout the life of the creator, plus fifty to a hundred years after the creator's death. A common way to avoid paying the creators of various works that has become popular over the last few years is internet piracy; that is, illegally downloading these works without paying for them.

This is a form of copyright infringement, and it is affecting various industries very severely because of the amount of people worldwide engaging in Internet piracy. The software industry has also suffered substantially because of illegal downloading.