To make it faster to load and read,
I made a page for each "case":
Introduction
Copyright and copywrong
"Web piracy"
The N.E.T. Act in the United States
The Church of Scientology cases
The Shetland News hyperlink case
"The day the sites went out in Georgia"
The Digital Object Identifier
Music copyright on the Internet
Are they coming to take me away?
The most recent case
concerning journalists, January 1998
Webography (references)
Procedure (what I did)
The purpose of copyright is both economical and moral. One should be able to make money from the things that one produces, and one should have the right to be recognised as the author of one's works. Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights speaks of this.
The only exception from the laws is usually "fair use" (which is the U.S. term). That means for instance that it is allowed to quote parts of copyrighted works in a debate or in other works of art, and that copies can be made for some educational purposes specified. In Sweden the exception is even greater: anyone may make one copy of a copyrighted work for her/his personal use-but not of computer programs.
Copying an image or a text and putting it on one's own web page is not "fair use". Since the page can be reached by anyone, it is not personal use either. What you can do, however, is to program the page to use an image that is found on another server. That would probably not be illegal.
Copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author. That now applies in most of Europe, but in the United States that time limit is still 50 years. There are suggestions about a change there, too. The U.S. also has a principle about letting the laws in effect at the time govern older works. That is not so in Europe, where the time limit was extended partially because the death of Hitler was approaching its 50 years, which would have allowed Mein Kampf to be re-issued. For example, Sweden changed its law in 1994.
It is up to each copyright holder to protect the copyright by filing lawsuits against copyright infringers. In addition, there is the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which deals with international copyright treaties.
Copyright is closely related to trademarks. It was a trademark suit that forced former MTV video jockey Adam Curry to surrender his domain name "mtv.com" a few years ago. Nowadays courts would not treat a domain name in terms of trademark protection.
The existing copyright laws--for books, art and so on--do not actually have to be changed much to include Internet publishing. However, one situation that was unforeseen in the old copyright laws is one that concerns journalists: Should the newspaper that buys articles from freelance journalists have the right to publish the articles not only in the paper edition but also on the web? At the moment this is undecided. Judges who rule in such cases keep saying that the law was not written with this in mind-and rule in favour of the newspapers. (See for example an article on this in Wired News, the URL is in the Webography.)
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