(c) & the Web

Chris Rusbridge wrote:
>>
>> If I put up a web page, it is copyright, and anyone who downloads it
>> (under the stricter interpretations in the US and practically any in the
>> UK) infringes my copyright. But since there is no other purpose in
>> putting it up other than public access (or at least, no other purpose a
>> reader could know without having down-loaded it first), the assumption is
>> that I would lose any court action against a reader on the basis of the
>> implied licence.

This is an excellent point. Copying is the raison d'etre of the Web: to generate a page, the client must duplicate and interpret the host's HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Many Web authors, I suspect, learned how to create pages by peeking at other programmers' code. The ability to appropriate structural features and bits of formatting from other pages has, I believe, been a major factor in the exponential growth of the Web. And, judging from the recent explosion of web sites, there is apparently no risk of underincentive to produce (not yet, at least).

In addition to questions regarding duplication, the Web presents a number of interesting problems over and above those presented by traditional protocols (FTP, Telnet, Gopher, E-mail, etc.) Consider, for instance, the singular problem of remote "inline images." I can very easily include, on my Web page, a link to an image on someone else's server. When a user then reads my page, that user's browser reaches out and grabs the image from the owner's server and displays it on the user's screen (the image is not transmitted through or anywhere near my server). Is my act of merely "pointing" to someone else's copyrighted image -- effectively including it by reference -- an infringement of an exclusive right? Surely not reproduction, since I'm not making a copy (the user is). Display? Derivative work? Perhaps. This is an interesting puzzle, and it's not just academic: see http://seidel.ncsa.uiuc.edu/copyright/ for an interesting account of Peter Leppik's tangle with United Media over the "Dilbert" comic strip.

Daniel R. Pote
2L Arizona State College of Law
dpote[_at_]imap1.asu.edu Received on Wed Oct 25 1995 - 22:46:27 GMT