Copyright Infringement and Plagiarism: How People Misuse the Internet

The invention of the personal computer started with a revolution in the 1970s. Small start up companies, which were basically nerds in basements putting together computers, slowly started to run the word. With the help of venture capital and competition, companies like Apple, Microsoft and IBM were started and names such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates started to become household names. With this invention of the computer, came the inevitable invention of the internet. The internet slowly evolved over the years from becoming something that businesses used to connect to a household necessity. Now the internet is something most people use on a daily basis. In fact, according to a techcrunch.com article, the average adult spends 13 hours a week online.

While the amount of time spent online is a misuse of technology in itself, it's what people are doing while online that can be seen as a problem. There are three main misuses of the internet that are most relevant today: copyright infringement, plagiarism and cyberbullying.

The first of these, copyright infringement on the internet. The mass attention towards online copyright infringement started in 2000 when Napster, an online company for pirating music, faced several court cases. (A brief article on that case can be found here.) However, pirating music did not stop with this court case. According to www.podcastingnews.com, in 2008 the average teenager had $800 of pirated music on their ipod. Music isn't the only type of entertainment that is pirated. The movie industry also faces this problem. There are websites, such as this one, who post lists every year of the most pirated movies and the top contenders were downloaded millions of times.

Plagiarism is another misuse of technology that is found through the internet. Most college and high school students have a section of their student handbook that addresses their school's plagiarism rules and the consequences that go along with violating these rules. Along with that, most college professors also include a section on plagiarism in their syllabi. Statistics on plagiarism are hard to find, but I was able to find one article that stated that University of Florida had about 66% of students had plagiarism had one point or another. However, now with the internet plagiarism is easier and easier to get away with. There are websites that specifically sell papers to college students, with cost correlated with the grade it guarantees to earn you. Because of easy internet access at most colleges, these websites are easy to find and easy to use, thus making the plagiarism problem worse. (Side note: I did not include any links to these sites because I did not want to encourage plagiarism.)

The third recent misuse of the internet is cyber-bullying. According to www.stopcyberbullying.org, "'cyberbullying' is when a child, preteen or teen is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child, preteen or teen using the Internet, interactive and digital technologies or mobile phones." The most infamous case of cyber-bullying is most likely the one of Megan Meier. Megan Meier was 13 when she began receiving messages from a boy. When these messages turned mean, she committed suicide. It eventually was discovered that the boy had never existed and the myspace profile was in fact created by the mother of one of her classmates, who was aware that Megan was on antidepressants. An article with a bit more detail, and the article where this information came from can be found here. Several other cyber-bullying cases have been in the news over the last few years and the results of cyber-bullying are never good.