Copyright Issues

As the internet grows, more people are becoming authors of creative works. Internet users need no publisher to print and distribute their works, and the gain from this spread of information and ideas has been astounding. However, because of this wealth of information, issues of protection of intellectual property for these works have been raised. In the past, copyright--and therefore plagiarism and honor code--violations were very clearly defined; there were very clear bounds on what was and was not appropriate in writing a paper or performing research. The growth of the internet as a large information source has made the line between acceptable and unacceptable use of information much less clear, though. Because it is a new medium, unlike any of the past, the internet lacks clearly defined copyright laws and rules on plagiarism. Although there is a law that copyrights all internet materials automatically, it is far from reasonable. People's views on what is involved in copyright infringement or plagiarism differ significantly from this law. This conflict must eventually be resolved so that a clearly defined and reasonable standard on copyright protection can be enforced.

There has been an attempt to place copyright restrictions on materials uploaded to or sent through the internet. The Berne copyright convention: "stipulated that all documents are considered copyrighted upon their creation." (1) This would, in addition to web pages, include emails and posts to newsgroups or chat rooms. This system of copyright produces many problems with online materials, though. One of the main problems with indiscriminately copyrighting materials in this way is that there are many documents for which this law is unreasonable. One type of document would be email. Forwarding an email would be considered a copyright infringement unless the sender first obtained authrorization from the original writer of the email. This is clearly an inefficient way to communicate and pass documents around via the internet. Another problem with this law is that it does not consider the information in the document when copyrighting it. Historically, copyright had to be placed on creative works. (2) Now, however, any information on the internet can be copyrighted. This makes the division between public and private knowledge very unclear, and a conflict could arise based on the definition of what is or is not public knowledge.

However, there is a problem if one considers the other extreme: using the internet as if all the information on it was public knowledge. One article states the problem clearly: "Students frequently assume that anything on the Internet is public domain, theirs for the taking, and thus need not be cited." (1) This perception is a problem because it could lead to the use of creative works of others as part of a student's paper or research without the proper citation. If this way of treating information on the internet prevailed the academic community would be significantly affected. Ideas could be taken from internet sources and used as public knowledge for a paper or research. Because it can be used to justify taking other people's ideas and using them as one's own this view of documents on the internet should not be made universal.

The matter of copyrighting documents on the internet is a hard one, as can be seen by the above discussion. The two views on internet copyrighting show the two extremes: one that copyrights everything, and one that copyrights nothing. Neither of these is an optimal solution to the problem of copyright protection on the internet, and more needs to be done to create a reasonable international standard. The best answer lies between the two, where a person's work on the internet can be copyrighted if it fits the criteria, but is public knowledge otherwise. That way, a person can protect their works on the internet if they wish, but are also able to distribute information for the convenience of other internet users.

For further reading:

1.      http://www.svsu.edu/~dboehm/IntellProp.htm

2.      http://www.templetons.com/brad/copyright.html

3.      http://www.svsu.edu/~dboehm/pixels.htm

4.      http://online.santarosa.edu/cis84.41/integrity.html

5.      http://senate.ucsc.edu/cot/RPT9798.html