Hypertext vs. Papertext: Copyright Issues

All legal issues can be confusing and convoluted to the uninitiated. Copyrights are no exception. Most company home pages that you go to have a small copyright notice on the bottom of their front node, and frequently on the rest of their nodes also. They do this because they are used to it. Companies put copyrights on everything they print. Many authors do the same. The law seems fairly straight-forward for papertext: if you write something, all you have to do is label it as copyrighted, and it is. There is also a fair use provision which allows text to be legally quoted for academic purposes. However, some of this breaks down on the Web.

The Web is a more robust medium than paper is. In paper, you put words down, and you copyright your words. On the Web, there are more than just words. There is code behind your words. There are also graphics. Copyright law, as it stands, protects the representation of ideas, but not the ideas themselves. So how exactly does your code fall into this? Your code affects your representation, but not your content? So can you copyright your code or not? And do you need to? Anyone who brings up your document has the opportunity to view your code. How can you stop them from stealing it? How would you know if they did?

The U.S. Copyright Office is grappling with many of these issues. There is even a Written Testimony on NII Copyright Protection Act. It give a lot of answers to questions as well as other information on the National Information Infrastructure Copyright Protection Act, a bill currently being discussed in the U.S. House of Representatives.

For a more in depth discussion on some of the issues surrounding copyrights on the World Wide Web, I refer you to Cyberspace Copyright, a site I collaborated on earlier this year. There are also pointers to a lot more information on copyrights on the World Wide Web.

You might also be interested in checking out The Copyright Website, an excellent source of information on copyrights, both electronic and on paper.

Which path would you like to follow?

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