The Legal Impacts of ICT: Copyright Designs and Patent Act

Introduction


Hi, I'm Luca and I am a student in year 10 at St. Francis Xavier's College in Woolton, Liverpool. One of the subjects I am currently studying at school is ICT, and I am going to share my knowledge and understanding of this subject with everyone in a series of blogs. In this particular blog, I will be discussing the legal impacts of ICT: copyright designs and Patent Act. I hope that you enjoy this blog, and come away learning something new which you can hopefully pass on to someone else.




The Act and what it Stands for


The Copyright designs and Patent Act was introduced in 1988 to protect the time, effort and money by the people who create original pieces of work. 


This can apply to people such as composers of music, authors of books, the makers of a film, a computer game designer or a company who create applications such as word processing software.


All of these people put a lot of time, money and effort into all of the work in which they produce, and luckily and quite rightly for them, their work belongs to them.




Copyright and ICT


The act protects a lot of work, no matter whether it is computer based or written work. 


Some examples of how someone can breach copyright in ICT are: 


Copying software


Copying or illegally downloading music


Copying photographs or images from the internet

Copying pieces of writing from the internet and using them in your own pieces of work or posting it onto your own website and pretending that it is all your own work.