What is COPYRIGHT?
Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States to authors of “original works of authorship.” This includes literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and certain other creative works. A copyright holder can prevent others from copying, performing or otherwise using the work without his or her consent (Legalzoom n.d.).
What’s the use of Copyright?
According to Snapper (1999), copyright piracy harms the copyright owner. The harm is almost always viewed as a crime against property. The most common harm is the victim’s loss of revenue from unauthorized copying, which is commonly called ‘theft’.
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What is PIRACY and PLAGIARISM?
Piracy is the infringement of a copyright, and plagiarism is the failure to give credit (Snapper 1999). In this advance digital world, the increasing use of Web-based electron publication has created new contexts for both piracy and plagiarism. We can access and download free songs, movies, software and information easily. What are the effects of Plagiarism? Based on the reading of Snapper (1999), plagiarism destroys the scholarly trails and causes significant harm to the scholarly effort itself.
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What are the effects of Plagiarism? Based on the reading of Snapper (1999), plagiarism destroys the scholarly trails and causes significant harm to the scholarly effort itself. What’s the harm in plagiarism? There is no direct financial harm. And, given the strong tradition of refusing to grant property protection over ideas and information, it is unlikely that we would want to grant an author any financial interest in the uncopyrighted content of a paper. Perhaps there is an indirect financial harm to the author who fails to gain a reputation as ideas are taken without giving ‘due credit.’ The actual harm done by plagiarism is not harm to the author as much as harm to the reading public.
References:
Legalzoom n.d, Copyrights Education Center, accessed 12/9/2012, http://www.legalzoom.com/copyrights-guide/copyrights-definition.html
Snapper, J 1999, On the Web, plagiarism matters more than copyright piracy, accessed 8/9/2012, http://www.springerlink.com/content/l215064qj8kk1331/
SzeYing 
It is a good way to simplify the concept of Copyright Law. There is no doubt that there is no privacy in the Web today. With Copyright Law, authors and other composer can sustain their ownership over their work. Plagiarism is also acted under the Copyright Law where is protects scholarly journal, research paper and scholarly books by people. We as students like to have the easy way out, where we like to copy and not think of words for our assignment or research paper. But with the plagiarism it stops students from doing such act and learns and understand the work that have to go through in order to do a research. I guess, if there is no Copyright Law in the world, there won’t be any high education scholar research in the world.
I very agree of the point you mention on your last paragraph (The actual harm done by plagiarism is not harm to the author as much as harm to the reading public.) it really can let the public misleading by the copy cat. Because it really will bring the harm to those readers, because the internet now this too many users and we hardly differentiate who is the original people.