The World Wide Web is possibly the largest arena of
personal thievery in existence today. The vast majority of people using the Internet
freely take words and images that belong to someone else....and see nothing wrong with
it. If you walk up to someone on the street, and take something from them without
permission, most people would clearly agree that is an act of thievery. Yet the same
people will visit a Website, copy words and use them in a report for school, or copy a
picture and put it on their website, without thinking about the fact that it belongs to
someone else.
|
The truth
is that every item created by someone is legally copyrighted. Automatically.
As soon as any self-created work [in any artistic form] is finished, the
maker of that work has a valid copyright to it; and can distribute it, sell
it, or give it away as they choose.
The problem is that current laws
don't cover the Internet very well. United States laws cover domestic
issues, and there are foreign laws regarding copyright, but none that
effectively cover electronic media yet.
There are a number of forces arguing
that material on the Internet should be free for all users, and there
are some historical precedents where computer codes and other materials
were--and still are--freely shared.
To see more about topic of Internet
copyright, take a look at these links:
|