"Copying is a crime of ethics"

   I found the article written by Megan J. Forness, a Rochester, IL high school student quite interesting. In her piece, she clears up a lot of unanswered questions, or even parts of the whole copyright issue that we never fully understood, or realized we were missing in the past. As my post title says, copying truly is a crime of ethics. We could very easily take an entire paragraph or two off some internet source, and switch up 3 words throughout the whole thing, but is that really gratifying to so bluntly use another's work?
   The Copyright Act of 1976 is a legitimate federal law that, "promotes the Progress of Science and sueful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive rights to their respective Writings and Discoveries." With the massive growth of so many different types of media, copyright infringement issues are plentiful and happen often.
   As Forness so beneficially educates us, copyright is in any of the following types of media;
1. literary works
2. music
3. drama works, including music
4. choreography
5. pictoral and graphics
6. motion pictures
7. sound recordings
8. architecture

   You can, and are recommended to obtain a copyright notice, but after March 1, 1989, works published are all automatically protected under copyright.
   
   It really is an interesting issue, with so many ports of information, and soooo many users of all 8 versions, policing copyright infringement would be an extremely daunting task. I think one of the largest influences, as I experienced myself was elementary teachers pressing the issue the most. We grew up "cite, cite, citing" our papers, or any work we did that required using outside information. We were threatened with consequences I'm not so sure are really in effect, but nonetheless it became habit, and is now second nature.