A comparative legal study of free society and control when dealing with the Internet and beyond

The laws that make up what society calls copyright are aspects that govern all bodies of art, literature, and creative ideas throughout the world. While this fact is not in dispute, the way people apply the rules of law surrounding copyright is a notoriously hot topic. Copyright allows authors to retain rights to the work they create. Through these laws, authors can own their work seventy years after their death. This pulls into question the length of time works are withheld from the public domain. Initially the market for regulation dealing with copyright concerned copied materials only, which lasted for a period of fourteen years. Copyright now protects written work, music, films, sound recordings, paintings, and some computer programs and chips, just to name a few. The underlying question is how do we as a society allow these works to be released from their protected bonds and regenerate them back into the general population? With such new inventions as the World Wide Web and the increased use of the Internet, the future of copyright has been thrown a curve ball. As civilization become keen on sharing everything from mass media to personal files, law suddenly has to conform at lightning speed in order to keep up. It is here where the focus shifts to how copyright law influences this sharing in a negative way though its attempt to control the dealings of unsuspecting users. The purpose of this thesis is to try to shed some light on these subjects and provide an understanding of how copyright worked its way up to controversial subject matter it is today. From the research examined and data collected, recommendations regarding the future of copyright will be presented