Slide 1:
Hello again, and welcome to COM  333 - Communicating through Internet.  Today, lecture number 9: “Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights”.

Slide 2:
Well, what is copyright?  Let’s begin with that.  Copyright gives the owner of a particular program or of text or graphics rights to that copy.  And when, as we deal with copyright we have to ask who owns this, and how may I use it, under what circumstances, and for what purposes?  So all of these issues are important, not only when we deal with paper or text documents, but also with multimedia presentations, such as those that we find on the Internet.  The electronic media raise these issues.  They’re key issues of the ease of reproduction of documents, or graphics, or images, and the ease of distribution.  So in multimedia instances, particularly in the electronic media, it’s much easier to make copies because one, with just the click of the mouse, can copy a document (maybe a couple of clicks).  And one can distribute this to hundreds of millions of people through the Internet with just a couple of further clicks of a mouse, so the ease of distribution and reproduction has never been nearly what it is today.

Slide 3:
Well, how do I copyright material on the Internet, or elsewhere for that matter?  Well, it’s simple; in fact it’s simpler than simple.  It’s automatic.  Current laws in the United States, actually since 1989, give copyright to everything that you create.  For example, if you maybe doodling while you listen to this lecture, those doodles are automatically copyrighted by you and they belong to you.  And so what material you produce does not have to carry that familiar “copyright date by person” as in “Copyright 1999” or “2000 by Ray Schroeder”.  It doesn’t have to carry that particular verbiage in order to make it copyrighted.  It still is copyrighted.  The creator is given rights, since 1989 in the United States, is given rights over all of material that is created by that individual.  So the notice is not required, although it can be advantageous in certain cases to go ahead and put that up and one can still formally file with the trademark and copyright office and that also might be of some further protection in certain circumstances, but in general, all creative work, whether it be text, or image, or even doodles, are immediately copyrighted automatically.

Slide 4:
Well, what are these rights?  Well, the rights are the exclusive right to control that work and whatever is done with it.  So any copies in particular, whether they are electronic or otherwise -- the rights to those copies, belong to the individual who authored the work.  Now, nearly all cases of use are covered by copyright.  That is, for profit uses, as we might expect.  If a for-profit enterprise were to use a graphic or image -- they would need to get rights in order to use that.  But also non-profits -- non-profit organizations and entities must also get rights and they can be held liable for use of material that is copyrighted.  Now there are some fair use exceptions, generally dealing with education and libraries -- a limited use of certain publicly-displayed items are provided to educators.  Only under certain circumstances and for a certain amount of time or a certain number of copies, but these are really quite limited.

Slide 5:
These are very important … the whole issue of copyright is very important in the Internet.  Of course, as one might expect then, web pages are automatically copyrighted, the pictures on web pages are automatically copyrighted, and the text on the Internet is automatically copyrighted.  And that includes web pages or even Usenet or even e-mail.  So, what does this mean?  It means that nearly everything on the Internet is copyrighted.  The exception of sorts might be documents at web sites operated and owned by the federal government.  As a citizen of the United States, you own the federal government and so you may use any images or text from those federal agencies and any of the material they display on their web pages without seeking permission.  But otherwise, that means if you find a neat cartoon on the Internet or a great picture, you really don’t, do NOT have the right to copy it and put that picture onto your own web page.

Slide 6:
Well, perhaps the most pressing issue on the Internet regarding copyright is the new MP3 format and the evolving MP4 liquid audio format.  This is really a hot issue on the ‘net.  MP3 is MPEG, that “Motion Pictures Engineers Group”, layer 3 audio compression.  What that means, is that it is a way of compressing music or audio and allows one to store near-CD quality.  Most people can’t really tell the difference.  So we’ll call it CD quality at a further compression of 6:1, that is, in 1/6th or perhaps up to 1/10th of the space - as little as 1/10th of the space - one can store a music cut, a song.  Now there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of recordings available on the Internet in MP3 format.  And these are available free from sites that are on the Internet and one can download them using FTP or simply go to the ‘net and use the web to download them.  Well, many of these, of course, are copyrighted; and released CD’s -- entire CD’s are being put up at various sites on the Internet and people, rather than purchasing those CD’s, go to the ‘net and simply download them.  Now there is free software, which is available at many places on the Internet, to play the MP3 format through the computer.  And so again, many, many people are using this and storing thousands of songs and music cuts on their computer, and then playing them through the computer using the MP3 format.  Also now, there’s a growing industry in stand-alone MP3 players, much like CD players, although the initial ones are using flash RAM cards rather than CD’s, so that one can just download it from the computer and without actually taking anything of the size of a CD, stick it into the device -- some of those devices are called RIO or MPMan or there’s Clikman, which is an integrated device that allows audio recording as well as playback of previously recorded material.  These devices, which sell for $200 or less, are like portable CD players, although they are much smaller and they don’t skip and they don’t have a transport; you know, there’s nothing whorling around inside of them.  It’s simply reading the bits and bytes off of the flash RAM.  Well, these devices, of course, are enjoying great and growing popularity.  So, as all of this evolves, pirate audio seems to be thriving on the Internet and this is really, I think, an excellent example of copyright issues on the ‘net and there’s a great concern in the recording industry about MP3 distribution undercutting the for-sale distribution of CD’s, and so this becomes a major issue.

Slide 7:
Well, what about links?  And I think this is an important, safe place for us on the Internet.  In general, you may link from your page to any other page.  Now, it is appropriate and courteous, and I would say most safe, to ask for permission before you link to a page, but generally that’s not required.  You see, if there’s a page that is publicized through search engines and through indexes on the Internet, they are seeking to reach a larger audience for their page, so in general, your putting a link to their page on your page is not a negative thing.  But, there are some issues that might be involved, for example, if your page is partisan in some political or social issue, and you link to another page, then through that linkage you are lending your credibility, if you will, your aspect or your certain angle on a social issue or a political issue, to that… to the page to which you link, and there might be some concern there.  And there’s a celebrated case between TicketMaster and Microsoft, where Microsoft included a link to TicketMaster on one of its pages and TicketMaster contended that Microsoft put that link on their page to try to further increase traffic to the Microsoft page.  And so there are certain issues involved, but, in general, for an individual homepage to link to pages, which are related or have an interest, it’s entirely appropriate.  But again, it’s most courteous and safest to ask for permission before you put a link on your own page.

Slide 8:
Well, citing the Internet follows along with copyright issues.  How do you give credit where credit is due?  And so citing sites, that pun intended, becomes a real issue.  The MLA and APA and other styles have been adapting to the new electronic technologies, and I’ve included a link for this week’s readings to a number of style books that show you how you can best cite the Internet using a variety of styles.  The key issue, though, in citing the Internet is that archives are generally not kept of the entire World Wide Web.  So, while in print, past issues are commonly kept.  Let’s say, oh, a newspaper, the local (Springfield, IL) State Journal-Register, will have copies of all its previous printed editions.  And they can be accessed and one can actually see the original report.  Or the same is true generally of books -- that publishers, libraries, and others keep out-of-print books in stock so that one can refer to the original volume, but web pages change daily and commonly no backup and no archive is kept.  So when you are conducting research and you refer to another document that’s on the web, when those persons reading your research try to find that web page they may find (1) that it has gone away or (2) that it is changed substantially and the material that you cited from that page is no longer there.  So it is common in scholarly publications to attach a print of the original web page, when you’re conducting research and citing an Internet site; it’s common to attach a print, or a paper copy, or an electronic copy of that page.

Slide 9:
Well, in conclusion, I think that we need to assume that everything on the Internet is copyrighted and treat it that way.  Ask for permission if you’re going to use anything off the web.  Visit the links for this week and then get into our WebBoard discussion.  I’m going to raise the issue of MP3 and some other Internet copyright issues for discussion this week.  So, we’ll talk to you again next week.