 Provide a basis for determining who in the organization should control access to a particular item of information.

 A copyright on a work gives authors and artists exclusive rights to duplicate published and sell their material.  Common infringements of copyright are software privacy and unauthorised downloading of music.  Some uses of copyrighted material are not so clear cut with respect to the law because copyright law also gives the public fair use of copyrighted material.

Advantages Authors have exclusive rights for their creations for a certain period of time so only the author could distribute his work and profit from it. Authors are more inclined to produce more works if they got exclusive compensation. Disadvantage Publish or download the work of others on the internet. The use of small flash memory devices and CD/DVD burners to copy the works of others. Publish and sell other people’s material.

 Should an individual be able to download contents of your website, modify it and then put it on the web again as their own?  Should a teacher have the right to print material from the web and distribute it to all the members of the class for teaching purpose?  Should students be able to post projects or essays they have written on the web, making it tempting for other students to download and submit as their own work?

 Should someone be able to scan photographs or pages from a book, publish them to the web and allow others to download them/  Should someone be able to put the lyrics to a song on the web?

 A trademark protects a companies logo and brand names. A controversy with trademarks relates to web addresses.  When creating a website, some people and smaller companies purposely acquire a web addresses that uses the exact trademarked name of their competition or a very similar name.

 Another form of infringements of intellectual property rights is plagiarism. The definition of plagiarism is; Plagiarism occurs when a students passes off as the students' own work, or copies without acknowledgement as to its authorship, the work of any other person.  Teachers and lecturers can check if work has been plagiarised by typing key sections into a search engines to find the original, or submitting the work to a special plagiarism checking site.

 Software theft can take place in many forms, from someone physically stealing from the media that contains software, to illegally copy or burning CDs or DVDs, or to install a software to more than one computer when it is only licensed to one.

 Software privacy is the unauthorised and illegal duplication of copyrighted software. Software privacy is by far the most common form of software theft.  Usually uses are permitted to: 1. Install the software on only 1 computer. 2. Make 1 copy for backup 3. Rent or lease a software 4. Export the software