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)
Copyright infringement on the Internet is more than the occasional case of plagiarism or publishing a picture without authorization. Since a computer-made copy is exactly like the original, the damage to copyright holders can be considerable.
An Internet site for finding expert witnesses and consultants is the Expert Pages. It is a free service, but others have tried to charge users for their information: "Several Web Pirates have attempted to illegally obtain our content and use it for their commercial gain." Therefore they launched several copyright lawsuits, in order to maintain free access-and without commercials-for "attorneys, law firms, insurance companies, government agencies, law enforcement officials and the media".
They consider this very important "to the continued viability of valuable free content on the Internet." On their page about the publicity surrounding the case they say: "As the articles state, unless Internet innovators like Expert Pages can protect their original content and databases from pirates, the Internet will be reduced to a choice between 'pay per view' on the one hand, and 'soaps and reruns' on the other." This statement is perhaps more valid for an agency such as Expert Pages than for a news organisation, but it could nonetheless be important for all kinds of services on the net.
In October 1996 the web news service TotalNEWS had one of its frames linked to news websites, but it kept the revenue from the advertisments which appeared in a frame around it. This could be considered a form of piracy, since it basically is making money off someone else's work. In February 1997 six news organisations sued TotalNEWS: Dow Jones, Washington Post, CNN, Time, Times Mirror Co., and Reuters. They claimed, among other things, that their trademarks were being diluted. "Misappropriation of plaintiffs' intellectual property" and "interference with plaintiffs' relationship to advertisers" were two other counts. An agreement was reached in June 1997. It allows the links to remain, but bars the use of frames around the plaintiffs' sites.
Not all information crimes on the net are related to copyright. In the Swedish newspaper Metro on 31 January 1998 there was a short piece on a Japanese man who was being sued for stealing information from the private employment agency Tempstaff. He supposedly charged his customers USD 500 for consulting his Internet archive of 90,000 women, all sorted by physical appearance.
Continuing along these lines, another case that found its way onto my path was the case of PRIVATE, a pornography company that had just won its first ["internet copyright"] case. (I use the square brackets here to show that the quotation marks were part of the search. That is how I found it!) Someone else had been selling pictures originating from their website, and now that they had won in court, they offered a reward for information on where other unauthorized pictures of theirs might be found.
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