Copyright infringement

Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to produce derivative works. The copyright holder is usually the work's creator, or a publisher or other business to whom copyright has been assigned. Copyright holders routinely invoke legal and technological measures to prevent and penalise copyright infringement.

Copyright infringement disputes are usually resolved through direct negotiation, a notice and take down process, or litigation in civil court. Egregious or large-scale commercial infringement, especially when it involves counterfeiting, or the fraudulent imitation of a product or brand, is sometimes prosecuted via the criminal justice system.

Estimates of the actual economic impact of copyright infringement vary widely and depend on other factors. Nevertheless, copyright holders, industry representatives, and legislators have long characterised copyright infringement as piracy or theft – language which some US courts now regard as pejorative or otherwise contentious.

The terms piracy and theft are often associated with copyright infringement. The original meaning of piracy is "robbery or illegal violence at sea", but the term has been in use for centuries as a synonym for acts of copyright infringement. Theft, meanwhile, emphasises the potential commercial harm of infringement to copyright holders. However, copyright is a type of intellectual property, an area of law distinct from that which covers robbery or theft, offences related only to tangible property. Not all copyright infringement results in commercial loss, and the US Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that infringement does not easily equate with theft.

This was taken further in the case MPAA v. Hotfile, where Judge Kathleen M. Williams granted a motion to deny the MPAA the usage of words whose appearance was primarily "pejorative". This list included the word "piracy", the use of which, the motion by the defence stated, serves no court purpose but to misguide and inflame the jury.

The term "piracy" has been used to refer to the unauthorised copying, distribution and selling of works in copyright. In 1668 publisher John Hancock wrote of "some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies" in the work A String of Pearls: or, The Best Things Reserved till Last by Thomas Brooks. Over time the metaphor mostly used in the book-trade became more common, such that the use of the word 'pirate' itself to describe unauthorised publishing of books was attested to in Nathan Bailey's 1736 dictionary An Universal Etymological English Dictionary:

'One who lives by pillage and robbing on the sea. Also a plagiary'

The practice of labelling the infringement of exclusive rights in creative works as "piracy" predates statutory copyright law. Prior to the Statute of Anne in 1710, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557, received a royal charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Article 61 of the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) requires criminal procedures and penalties in cases of "willful trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy on a commercial scale." Piracy traditionally refers to acts of copyright infringement intentionally committed for financial gain, though more recently, copyright holders have described online copyright infringement, particularly in relation to peer-to-peer file sharing networks, as "piracy".