Copyright Or Wrong?

            People have always found ways around copyright laws. Whether you duplicate movie rentals or photocopy the science textbook you are infringing on rights to royalties. Even though you know people base their livelihood on the profit made from the sale of their products it doesn't stop you from conveniently ignoring the FBI warning or © stamp. Just because technology is changing doesn't mean that the human characteristic to get something for nothing will. This is true in the digital age, where concern for the copyright laws was not an early consideration and these laws have been slow to be incorporated and chance of them ever being enforceable is slim.
             The world wide web, a massive collection of free information; good if you'd like to research facts for your next paper; bad if you cut and paste your way through existing papers to create a Frankenstein monster of protected works. There are even web sites dedicated to the cheating masses that are basically enormous databases of essays and papers. Some of these sites even require their members to pay fees. Plagiarized assignments are forcing teachers to change curriculum so that students can be supervised as they write to ensure that the paper wasn't co-written by Ctrl - C.
             In the past information such as music, pictures and movies were written on tapes such as Cassettes, VHS, and 35-mm film, but the recent popular formats are purely digital formats. With the older methods duplicates were hard to get because actual physical transactions had to take place. Also, with older mediums, reproductions lost quality over generations. With 0's and 1's, digital media can be replicated with exact copies. With global communities such as the Internet, digital media can be transferred quickly and exponentially. .
             In 1987, the Moving Pictures Expert Group created a standard in music media called a MPEG 3 or MP3. MP3's allow users to take audio CD's and store them in compressed files on their computers.