Copyright Infringement In The Digital Age: An Analysis Of The Issues And Challenges In The Present Era
- IJLLR Journal
- Sep 7
- 2 min read
Ritika Singh, UPES, Dehradun
ABSTRACT
In the digital era, copyright protection has become a major concern for content creators, publishers, and users. It has revolutionized the way we create, consume, and distribute content. As digital platforms proliferate, copyright holders face greater difficulties in securing their intellectual property rights. With the growth of digital technologies like the internet, social media, and mobile devices, it has now become simpler than ever to produce and distribute digital material such as music, movies, photographs, and text. As a result, it becomes crucial for authors, artists, programmers, coders, and owners/publishers of applications to maintain copyright protection for their creative and intellectual works and to hold onto their rights if such copyrights are violated. The internet's global reach exacerbates this issue by making it more difficult to enforce laws consistently across borders.
Given the transformative impact of creative work in the digital realm, establishing the bounds of fair use poses particular challenges. While user- generated platforms provide exciting opportunities for innovation, they also complicate the concept of copyright ownership. Sophisticated methods of avoiding discovery, such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and encryption technology, often frustrate police operations. International treaties like the Berne Convention and the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Copyright Treaty lay the groundwork for collaboration, although many countries do not follow these standardized regulations. This mismatch provides loopholes, allowing infringers to exploit states with lax enforcement. DRM restrictions are usually circumvented by users, and in certain instances, these safeguards have come under fire for impeding permissive uses of digital content, such as fair use or personal copying. Unfortunately, the emergence of the digital age, characterized by digital technologies such as the internet, scanners, digital cameras smartphones, smart televisions, e-books, social media, etc., has caused strain in copyright protection due to the relative ease of replication, manipulation, reproduction and dissemination of copyrighted materials in digital formats within the digital space. This paper identified the following as the major challenges confronting copyright protection in the digital age; the ease in reproduction of copyrighted material, the ease in sharing & distribution of copyrighted, the availability of compact storage devices, and the challenge of detecting or tracing the sources of such infringement due to the apparent similarity between the original and the duplicate copies. The report acknowledges the legal reaction to this societal danger on both the international and local levels, notably the WCT, WTTP, and Copyright (Optical Disc Plant) Regulation. However, it was pointed out that the present local copyright policy is insufficient to meet the problem. In addition to these legislative frameworks, this study advises that Nigerian writers and creators of creative media material implement independent modern technical methods like blockchain and watermarking technologies to secure their work and avoid unfair exploitation.
Keywords: Copyright, Copyright Protection, Digital Rights Management, Digital Technologies, Fair Use, Digital Age.
