This article is aimed at writers, familiar with the basics of writing and copyright law, who are uncertain how copyright law applies to the Internet. If you are unfamiliar with copyright law in the first place, I recommend Brad Templeton’s excellent copyright page before you continue.
Now that you know what the law says, understand this: there is no law but social law that applies on the Internet. I do not mean to suggest that anyone is using the Internet to share illegally copied music files, or that any writers are sharing illegally copied music files. I certainly would never aid or abet others in sharing illegally copied music files. But if such things are happening, we might want to use that for perspective on just how important copyright law is to the average Internet user.
Nation after nation has tried to control the spread, alteration, and corruption of information and data on the Internet, and except for those nations that are willing to outlaw Internet access entirely, nation after nation has and will failed. With a touch of a button, I can distribute this article to every wired country. If I had any state secrets, and wanted to distribute them in this method, my country can and would arrest me, but there would be no way to keep those secrets out of the hands of every interested party on the planet. Kiddie porn now covers the earth, to the degree that hopelessly outgunned FBI agents are now arresting people who download it by accident, because they know they can’t stop the people who intentionally distribute it. Given that, you mustn’t expect your local law enforcement agency to send out a squad to protect that poem you worked so hard on.
Furthermore, it is a mistake to believe that refusing to publish on the Internet prevents you from having your copyright violated. Plagiarists are, almost by definition, lazy, and would prefer to steal work from the Internet than from a book, because it’s slightly easier. But you can’t rely on that. Some will figure out that if they steal from books, no one can use a search engine to discover their crimes, since the original is not available on the ‘Net. In other words, if you publish work on the Internet, there’s a strong chance your copyrights will be violated. But if you refuse to publish work on the Internet, there’s still a strong chance your copyrights will be violated, and no one will ever know about it.
Hey, you can’t find the future. Or, rather, you can fight the future, you just can’t win. The Internet is anarchistic, and an anarchist’s basic belief is that when humans are freed from government intervention, they will choose to behave in a civilized fashion towards one another. And for the most part, that is what is happening on the Internet. The exceptions are jaw-dropping, but in this basically lawless environment, there are very few people who want to hurt your career or take credit for your achievements. And although copyright law is becoming less enforceable by the day, the literary code of ethics on which it is based still exists. Furthermore, the speed of communication applies to you, as well as to plagiarists. Internet writers almost always hate plagiarists as much as their old-school counterparts do, and can spread the word of such a person with a speed unheard of fifteen years ago. These days, if you can show that you are plagiarized, you can correct the matter, and destroy the plagiarist’s literary career, in an afternoon.
I’m sure some readers already know, but let’s take a moment to discuss what the Internet is. There is no central Internet station, and therefore there is no single government that has dominion over it. The Internet is a collection of computers, hooked up to one another via telephone or cable, hopefully with the fastest possible connection. If you are in New York and want a web page from Tokyo, there is no computer from New York that is calling Tokyo. A computer in New York is hooked up to a computer in Dublin, which is hooked up to a computer in Paris, which is hooked up to another computer, until, through a series of hops, a computer in Tokyo receives word of your need for a web page, and is able to send the web page back through that same series of hops. If, by some chance, the computer in Dublin is down, a computer in London will be used instead. Not only can the Internet not be regulated, it can’t be destroyed without depriving the entire planet of electricity. And since all these computers are talking to relatively nearby computers, no single country or phone company is bearing an unreasonable share of the Internet’s costs.
Furthermore, if that citizen in Tokyo takes their web page down, it’s probably archived in those computers in New York, Dublin, Paris, etc. It might become extremely hard to find, but it is almost impossible to completely delete information once it has hit the Internet. Considering this, one begins to realize that not only are copyright laws often ignored on the ‘Net, but traditional copyright laws simply don’t work (and the presence of scanners means that a law that doesn’t work on the Internet no longer works anywhere, ever, period).
