If we take Steve Wade's opinion and say that everything on the WWW should be free and in the public domain, then do we have to remove any articles which might be copyrighted in their papertext form? What about companies with web pages? Do we make companies like IBM and Microsoft remove their home pages because they contain copyrighted graphics? Or maybe we just say that anything produced on the WWW is free and public, while anything transferred from papertext can still be copyrighted. Jonathan Rosenoer provides an interesting discussion of a court case involving the posting of copyrighted material to a Usenet newsgroup. This article can be found in the November 1995 issue of Cyberlaw.
What about the other school of thought? Should hypertext documents use the same rules as the papertext world for copyrights? There are many aspects of the papertext copyrights that would be easily portable. In general, anything you write is copyrighted by you. (Again, this is according to U.S. copyright laws.) So anything you write to the WWW should also be copyrighted by you, right?
There are, however, more implications in the world of the Internet and the World Wide Web. First of all, all your documents can be distributed across the world literally with the click of a mouse or push of a button. When someone calls up your document from Germany, for example, how is its copyright status effected? Is it still copyrighted in Germany or not?
Another thing which needs to be considered is the Fair Use provision of U.S. Copyright law. This provision states that you cannot quote more than 10% of someone else's work. On the WWW, how does one define the size of a document? Is it the size of each page or the size of an entire site, including all the pages? Can you only quote 10% of each page on any given site, or 10% of the total text of the site? What about links? If you link to a page, are you copying that whole page, or are you just referencing it as you might in a bibliography?
As you can see, there are a number of questions that need to be addressed when developing copyright laws for cyberspace. We are only now beginning to address these questions. No one knows for sure what the copyright laws in cyberspace will be in the future, but here are our ideas on what cyberspace copyright laws should be.