Law of the Internet
copyright 1996, 1997; updated April, 1997
Editor: Donald M. Cameron , Aird & Berlis
Contributors: Donald M. Cameron , Tom S. Onyshko & W. David Castell
General Table of Contents
For more details, see Detailed Table of Contents
7. Electronic Contracting Issues
9. Legal Ethics and the Internet
Detailed Table of Contents
2. What Qualifies for Copyright Protection?
3. What is Copyright Infringement?
4. Cases on Copyright Infringement on the Internet
posting other people's material on the Net
liability of Internet Service Providers and Hosts
Industry Canada Content-Related Internet Liability Study
links: Footnotes that take you there
Electronic Commerce Tax Issues
Charities
Introduction
European Database Directive
U.S. Initiatives
W.I.P.O. Initiatives
9. Legal Ethics and the Internet
Introduction
The Internet has been described as the "Information Highway," the embodiment
of McLuhan's Global Village and
"CB radio with a keyboard." In fact, is it the world's largest copying machine,
copying and transmitting data in the form of digitally stored information: text, graphics,
audio and video.
The Internet is the ultimate open system. On-line access is virtually free, and once
you are on, you have the freedom to move from database to Web site to on-line magazine.
This freedom to travel through the Internet has created an attitude that not only is
access free, but everything is free, and that copyrights (and other legal rights) can be
checked at the gateway. Users are confusing the liberty to browse or read with the right
to copy and retransmit.
The Internet has had explosive growth with the number of users estimated in October,
1996 as being about 40-50 million with the number of users doubling every twelve months
and the amount of traffic doubling every six months. (4) Increased
use results in increased legal issues. If the Internet obeys the principles of
thermodynamics, the increased number of participants will result in more collisions and
increased temperature. Intellectual Property law is becoming the most valuable legal tool
to resolve disputes on the Internet.
The most useful legal rights on the Internet are copyright and trademark rights. These
two areas of law represent the most inexpensive and most easily enforced forms of
intellectual property protection. Where one form of protection fails to assist, the other
may step in to help the injured party. In addition to copyright and trade mark, the use of
information on the Internet will be affected by other laws such as defamation law,
criminal law and the new European Database Directive.
The Internet provides a tremendous ability to access multimedia works containing some combination of text, graphics, audio and video. As pointed out in a report to the U.S. Information Infrastructure Task Force, "multimedia" is something of a misnomer. The defining feature of such a work is that it involves multiple categories of works included within a single medium , (5) making it more appropriate to refer to the work as "multi-work uni-media." In this paper multimedia works often will be described simply as information or data since, as one pundit noted, "It's all just bits."
Conclusions
In an influential Wired magazine article, John Perry Barlow suggested that in
the age of the Internet everything we know about intellectual property law is wrong.
"Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain
digital information," he wrote. (80) While it is true
that the Internet poses new challenges to established law, the relatively small amount of
case law achieving results for intellectual property owners on the Internet suggests that
the system "ain't broke" yet. Copyright and trade mark law appear to be keeping
the misappropriation of intellectual property to acceptably low levels on the Internet.
Copyright and trade mark law have a tradition of adapting to new technologies.
Copyright principles developed in the context of the printed page have been adapted to
apply to audio works, computer software and databases. The real challenge will not be in
the application of the law but in its enforcement. As noted at the beginning of this
paper, the Internet provides vast opportunities for copyright and trade mark infringement.
It will be up to litigants and the courts to fashion the most efficient strategies for
coping with all the "bits" of infringement.
Endnotes
4. The Economist ; October 19-25, 1996, p. 17.
5. Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, Information Infrastructure Task Force, Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure (Washington, D.C.: Information Infrastructure Task Force, September 1995) at 60-61.
80. John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas: A framework for rethinking patents and copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong)," (March 1994) Wired at 85.
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