Most people have difficulty understanding intellectual property rights, partly because of their abstract nature; they appear as just a bundle of invisible rights. Moreover, intellectual property rights are so complicated that it is easier to pretend they do not exist and to ignore them rather than to try to comprehend them. However, ignorance is no protection under the law - as many ordinary people have found out at their own expense. New international legislation regarding copyright has changed the way the public interacts with information, and as Bill Thompson, a commentator for the BBC World Service programme Go Digital, points out, the new legislation could make criminals of any one of us. Simply by using peer-to-peer network software to share unlicensed copies of films and music we could be breaking the law (Thompson 2003) .

How have we reached a situation where ordinary people can so easily find themselves breaking the law without even realising it? The answer lies in the changes to copyright law.

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