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For copyright purposes, a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work must be original and it must be set down in some permanent form, for example, on paper, computer disk, or on audio or video tape. It is not unusual for people to have the same idea at roughly the same time, but copyright applies in the way an idea is expressed, not in the idea itself. This is because ideas can encompass a wide range of concepts: for example, thousands of books and films have the same basicplots - boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl back, good triumphs over evil, and so on. So ideas, as opposed to the way in which they are expressed, cannot be protected under copyright law. Perhaps oddly, statistical lists and computer programs are also regarded as literary works and therefore come under copyright law. You are breaking the law when you reproduce the whole or a significant part of someone else's creation without their permission. This would include, for example, recording a CD or a video, putting on a public performance of a play, making photocopies, or copying onto a computer disk. It is also a breach of the law to key copyright material into a computer without consent, as is storing it on the computer memory. This can even apply to a small part of a work if the content is considered to be essential.
Infringement of copyright can be both a criminal act and a civil wrong. However, consumers who buy illegally copied materials, such as music CDs and films on DVD, for private use cannot be prosecuted, even if they know its origin.
