Copyright Violation
Copyright law is by far the most important of the Internet laws in relation to the World Wide Web (WWW) because multimedia development combines many different types of content such as music, text, graphics, and software in one bundle, which enjoys protection under copyright law. Thus, this hypertext document focuses strictly on copyright law. Copyright law in the United States was developed for the purpose of promoting the dissemination of information to advance knowledge
Exclusive rights allocated to an author are as follows:
Reproduction - The right to duplicate, copy, transcribe or imitate the work in fixed form.
Adaptation - The right to modify a work to create a new work.
Public Performance - The right to recite, play, dance or perform the work in a public place or to transmit the work to the public. In the case of film or audiovisual work, showing the work is considered “performance.” Incidentally, sound recordings do not have a public performance right.
Public Display - The right to show a copy of a work by means of some other medium such as film, TV, etc. in a public place.
If any of the above rights are violated, the owner of a work has the right to take legal action against the violator. These rights extend to the international treaty staked out by the Berne Convention in 1977. Any countries that have signed this treaty have consented to provide full recognition and enforcement of the above rights to copyrighted works from other countries that have also signed the treaty.
Fair Use and Plagiarism
Because Web developers are also consumers of Web technology, a Web developer might want to use a portion of someone else’s work in her or his Web page. Fortunately, existing copyright law provides for three circumstances when one....
