Intellectual Property Rights Information technology has presented legislators and lawyers—and you—with some new ethical ques

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问题                   Intellectual Property Rights
    Information technology has presented legislators and lawyers—and you—with some new ethical questions regarding rights to intellectual property. Intellectual property consists of the products, tangible or intangible, of the human mind. There are three methods of protecting intellectual property. They are patents (as for an invention) , trade secrets( as for a formula or method of doing business) , and copyrights ( as for a song or a book).
    Of principal interest to us is copyright protection. A copyright is the exclusive legal right that prohibits copying of intellectual property without the permission of the copyright holder. Copyright law protects books, articles, pamphlets, music, art, drawings, movies and computer software. Copyright protection is automatic and lasts a minimum of 50 years; you do not have to register your idea with the government (as you do with a patent) in order to receive protection.
    These matters are important because the Digital Age has made the act of copying far easier and more convenient than in the past. Copying a book on a photocopier might take hours, so people felt they might as well buy the book. Copying a software program onto another USB flash disk, however, might take just seconds.
    Public domain software, freeware and shareware can be legally copied, which is not the case with proprietary software.
    Piracy is theft or unauthorized distribution or use. A type of piracy is to appropriate a computer design or program. This is the kind that Apple Computer claimed in a suit (since rejected) against Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard alleging that items in Apple’s interface, such as icons and windows, had been copied.
    Software piracy is the unauthorized copying of copyrighted software. One way is to copy a program from one USB flash disk to another. Another is to download (transfer) a program from a network and make a copy of it.
    Plagiarism is the expropriation of another writer’s text, findings, or interpretations and presenting it as one’s own. Information technology puts a new face on plagiarism in two ways. On the one hand, it offers plagiarists new opportunities to go far afield for unauthorized copying. On the other hand, the technology offers new ways to catch people who steal other people’s material.
What may be possibly talked about in the next paragraph?

选项 A、The types of piracy
B、The ways of protecting copyrights
C、The importance of copyright protection
D、Network piracy

答案D

解析 本题考查对于后文内容的预判能力。题目是:下一段文章可能谈论什么话题?选D的依据是全文最后一段的第二句:“Information technology puts a new face on plagiarism in two ways.”信息技术在两方面给剽窃以新的特征。这句可作为前后两段的过渡句,说明后一段可能谈论选项D中谈到的内容,即网络盗版。
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