By Caragh Deery - Law Student @ St Hilda's College, Oxford
Copyright is the intellectual property right that protects “works”, such as films, books, sound recordings, and photographs. Copyright provides the owner of the work with a series of exclusive rights and, perhaps most importantly, allows copyright owners to protect against others copying or reproducing their work. The internet poses huge issues for copyright proprietors. The rise of platforms such as YouTube and TikTok mean that infringing content can be uploaded to the internet quickly and easily on a large scale. Infringing content is content that has been used in a way that infringes on an exclusive right of the copyright owner. For example, since films are copyright protected, if John, an ordinary YouTube user, uploads the entire “The Hunger Games” movie onto YouTube, then he will have infringed the copyright in that work.