Lesson 4 - Copyright 3:

Electronic Copying Can Infringe A Copyright

At the moment, it looks like the basic rules of copyright law are pretty much the same in cyberspace as they are in the "real world." Some people have argued that this can't work -- that online copyright rules have to be very different (or perhaps shouldn't exist at all). But for now, there's no indication that either Congress or the courts are about to accept this argument.

As we saw, things that are written down electronically are just as protected by copyright as things that come out on paper. Likewise, copying something in cyberspace can be just as much an infringement - assuming the copyright owner doesn't allow you to do it - as copying something on paper:

If you download an article from a newspaper Web site and forward it to a news group, you've made copies, which might be infringements.
If someone saves your e-mail in an archive, he's made copies, which might be infringements.
If you quote someone's newsgroup post in your response to the post, you've made copies, which might be infringements.

In some of these situations, the copies might be legal, either because they are EXPLICITLY ALLOWED by the copyright owner (you might have seem some online documents which specifically allow readers to copy them), because they are FAIR USES or, because they are allowed by IMPLIED LICENSES. We'll talk more about this later.

But they are definitely copies, and therefore potential infringements:

If a work is COPYRIGHTED (which, as we saw, is an easy hurdle to jump),
and you've made a COPY of it (which we'll talk about more below),
and you weren't authorized to do so -- authorized by the copyright owner's express permission, by an implied license, or by the fair use doctrine -
then you've violated the copyright law.

authors:

Larry Lessig David Post Eugene Volokh

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