With the birth of the Internet, we find ourselves with a wealth of information at our fingertips. We can look up anything from how long to cook your Thanksgiving Day turkey to who invented the airplane. However, this access to information also can lead to plagiarism or copyright infringement. More and more students, from elementary school to college, are searching the internet for content to use for their homework assignments. This is defiantly are great way to gather information, however, how many or just copying and pasting this information right into their papers?

Much of the content that is found on the internet is copyrighted material. This means that the material belongs to the person or persons that wrote the material. You are not allowed to copy, reproduce, or publish this content as your own. The earliest form of copyrighting dates back to 15^th century Europe to regulate and control printing by churches and government.

Once the distribution of music and movies became more common place, copyright laws extended into these areas as well. International copyright law was now needed to protect the owners of this material worldwide. As computers become common place in the home, peer-to-peer networks became popular as a way to illegally distribute movies, music, and software to users worldwide. The two most notable of these networks is Napster and Limewire. Millions of users access copyrighted content for personal use and some will even copy this material to CD’s and DVD’s for sale. There are now multiple organizations worldwide, such as the RIAA or Recording Industry Association of America, that work for a particular industry to stop copyright infringement. The impact of copyright infringement is huge. The recording industry itself loses over $7 billion dollars a year. Think about it the next time you want to not pay for that song.