Lesson 2 - Copyright 1:

Copyright In Cyberspace

Consider the following situations:

You buy a piece of software and e-mail it to five friends.
You download an article from a newspaper's Web page and post in on an electronic bulletin board.
You take a post from one news group and forward it to another news group.
You respond to someone's discussion list post, and quote part of his post in yours

. Each of these examples implicates copyright law. In each of them there's at least a possibility that you'd be violating the law (though we'll find that in at least some of them you're probably safe).

usually
gives a copyright owner the exclusive right to control copying
of a writing (or recording or picture or electronic transcription).

In the next several messages, we'll explore each of these three elements.

A WORD OF WARNING: Copyright law can be maddeningly vague, and copyright law online is doubly vague. We´ll often say something "might"be legal, and you might often be frustrated by it. But we have to be honest here - though copyright law is certain in some areas, it´s uncertain in others.

Under these circumstances, "might makes right".

authors:

Larry Lessig David Post Eugene Volokh

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