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3. Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

Material that has taken someone a lot of effort and creative talent to produce, is called 'Intellectual Property'.

It is only right that the owners of that material benefit financially from their effort should they wish to do so.

Therefore parliament has passed an Act to help protect their intellectual property rights.

It is called the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.

Computer systems have been heavily involved with this Act because they make it possible for people to easily access copyright material - both legally and illegally

For example there are perfectly legitimate music sites that sell tracks and pay the required royalty fees to the owners of the music for every track sold - and there are dubious sites that do not - they pay nothing to the original artist - is this fair?

Typical breaches of the CDP Act involving computer systems are :-

We have a mini-web that describes this in more detail