Much of the digital content distributed through the internet, or available for viewing or downloading at internet locations, is protected by
copyright. However, the conceptual basis and core principles of copyright law were established centuries before digital era technologies were invented. Groups lobbying for copyright law reform (either for tighter or more relaxed laws) often argue from a specific position dictated by the interest group they represent.
– Why does society award copyright to an author?
– Is copyright the appropriate way to protect an author’s right to profit from creating computer software?
– Does your answer to this change if you think of the author as an individual artist carefully writing computer code which consists of a few pages of elegant work?
– What if the author is a giant corporation paying thousands of people to contribute tiny changes to a huge project? (It has been estimated that the source code of Windows Vista is over 50,000,000 lines long, and a single worker at Microsoft might contribute 1,000 lines each year.)