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The Jedi Master Speaks

No. 11

Copyrights

em Português nell'Italiano

Copyrights are meaningless on the Web? Well, very nearly so. When I was advised of this, right after posting my first page on the World Wide Web, I was astonished. Why should the Web be any different than any other medium? Sure, it is easier to make exact copies of things on the Web, but so what? The law is the law, and copyrights serve the admirable purpose of protecting one's intellectual property, of ensuring that the creator of content owns it.

Ah, but it's not quite that simple. First of all, one must note that the very act of downloading a Web page is "making an exact copy" of it. Furthermore, since Web browsers "cache"...or temporarily store...all downloaded material, this exact copy is routinely stored on one's personal computer. In fact, servers all along the route by which the page arrives at your browser cache it as well, in order to speed up the retrieval of frequently accessed pages. So you, and every intermediate server on the World Wide Web ROUTINELY violate the international copyright laws!

Indeed, if those laws were to be followed to the letter, it would be necessary for those intermediate servers to get WRITTEN PERMISSION to pass along EACH AND EVERY packet in a given page from the owner of that page! Obviously, the Web could not exist at all were it to follow these rules. So let us assume that we needn't obey them, at least for routine downloads.

But, it gets even more complicated. When you link to an external page on your Web site, and that page belongs to someone else and it is downloaded, the action is functionally exactly the same as if you had copied it and placed that copy on YOUR site and the user had downloaded it from there. The only difference is whose server carries out the download. For the user, the result is exactly the same.

You might suggest,then, that one always ask permission before linking to someone else's pages or images. But, what about search engines? The results of searches are pages and pages of links to other's content! How exactly would search engines get the required permissions from the billions of pages now online?

By now, you are beginning to see the problem. The World Wide Web is nothing if not a giant electronic copying machine. Try to imagine a set of rules that would both protect online content from "theft" but still allow the Web to function.

Give up? So did I. The original advice I got was to regard anything I put on the Web as "belonging to the world." Upon reflection, I think this is VERY good advice.

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If you have comments or suggestions for Willy, you can contact him at:
willy@dreamagic.com

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