When publication becomes piracy in the internet Websites full of pirated content Internet has made its entrance in our lives for good, and an increasing amount of people choose it as a means of communication. Many also choose to present their activities or even to trade their products and services through personal websites. To make a website more appealing and to stimulate users to visit it, content is not enough. So site owners add photos, songs, software and other works of the intellect, which are not their own, either they trade them or not. Is it illegal to broadcast works of intellectual property (e.g. photos, songs, lyrics) in a website for commercial purposes even without financial benefit? Public broadcasting of intellectual property without the creator’s permission is prohibited by the law regardless of the means of broadcast. These websites are considered means of public broadcasting, as public is considered, according to article 3, par. 2 of law 2121/1993 on intellectual property rights, “any use or performance or presentation of the work, which makes the work accessible to a wider group than the close circle of family and the immediate social environment, regardless of whether the people of this wider circle are in the same or in different places.” It must also become known that public broadcast of copyrighted works is prohibited, regardless of if there is a purpose of financial profit or not. So, it is illegal not only to sell through a website photos, songs, etc, without creator’s consent but also the unauthorized disclosure and publication of their work. Citation of the author’s name is any case required, but it doesn’t solve the problem, as the creator must be able to "decide on the time, place and manner in which the work will be accessible to the public" and of course prohibit any distortion or other alteration of his work. Besides works of the intellect are not only the works of art, but computer programs and the preparatory material for their design, as well as databases. This of course means that we cannot have available in a web page, regardless of if there is profit or not, copyrighted software (except for open source projects of course) for visitors of the site to download to their computer. Is the prohibition set by the law absolute? Is it illegal even to post a small portion of a work online? Of course not. Otherwise critics and journalists would not be able to do their job. The law allows citation of an excerpt of a work of the intellect, without creator’s permission, for purposes of criticism, as long as the source and the name of the author are mentioned. It is of course a different thing, if a small part of the overall work of many artists is published after their death in the form of an anthology. It is illegal to upload the last hit of Anna Vissi in a website, but it is not illegal to have two songs from all the famous Jazz musicians of the last century. And of course equally illegal to uploading is downloading other people’s intellectual property. Illegal are not only those that include in the content of a website, a copyrighted work, but the ones who download it on their computer as well. The reproduction of a work for private use is not prohibited, only when it is from a legitimate source. So a user who desires to access the work of an artist has to search the internet for an official source, so there are no restrictions on access and use. Elena Alk. Spyropoulou Posted: Financial Ram