Copyright

Copyright is an example of a Social and Ethical Issue, it is also an international law, but is often subject to the discretion of the country of origin. Supposedly the original creator of a piece of work has exclusive rights to it, however in reality things do not work as they should. The SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) has sought to address these differences between a perfect world and ours by attempting to pass a bill that would place enourmous restrictions on the internet and give US prosecutors the right to close down websites and arrest owners over stolen material. This has since failed and been re-written twice and still not manage to get through US congress, this just further displays the unwillingness of the masses to hand over control of the internet and its massive amount of content. To give you an idea of the size of the internet, approximately 1 exabyte of data is uploaded per week, this is equivilant to 1,000,000 terabytes, or 1,000,000,000 gigabytes.

Information Technology

Social and Ethical Issues