Intellectual property and Copyright law.
Intellectual property allows people to own their creativity and innovation in the same way that they can own physical property (UK Government). Just as everyone wants to protect the things that they own, creators would want to protect things that they created. Legal protection of literary, dramatic, artistic, and musical works, sound recordings and performances is called copyright (Council of Ministers of Education, Canada). It provides creators with the legal right to be paid for and to control the use of their creativity or work by others. Copyright is based on a philosophical view that knowledge is generated spontaneously and not from the past (). A Marxist view about the purpose of copyright law is that it allows creators to gain economic rewards for their efforts. Only the creator has exclusive right to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform and display the work publicly. Copyright law should be protected and enforced because it takes enormous amount of time to create the work, it costs the creator a huge amount of money, and protecting their work would give them incentive to produce new work. .
There is a huge number of people who believe that copyright law should not be enforced. They believe that breaking such laws would not affect the creator in any way. There are different opinions available from people such as: .
The process of creating a useful work can take from one month to several years. The creators have to think of many things before they make the product ready for the use. For example a software company has to go through every stages starting from the requirements, specifications, development, testing and corrections. Only after passing through these stages, a fully functional software can be produced. A software company can then release its product. Obviously, no producer would want that the work for which they spent years gets stolen or copied.
