International Law

Kirk Teska, an adjunct law professor at Suffolk University Law School, has put together for IEEE Spectrum a good explanation of what you can legally take from the internet:

Intellectual property law has a history of clashing with new technologies. In the early 1900s, for example, when player pianos were all the rage, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the perforated music rolls fed into player pianos were not music?essentially because they didn?t look like sheet music and performed a mechanical function. The ruling meant that sellers of the music rolls did not infringe the copyrights of the composers whose music was played by means of the rolls. The copyright law was eventually changed to address that unfair situation, but the copyright/technology clash has continued with the advent of video players, Napster, and CD burners.

The result is an unsatisfying patchwork of legislative action, court decisions, and lobbying on the part of writers, artists, photographers, publishers, and musicians who sometimes embrace and other times feel threatened by technological advances. Unfortunately, that means there is often no clear-cut answer to the question of what you can legally take from the Web: it depends on what you take, why you take it, who you are, and what technology you use. Among other factors, the fair-use defense of copyright infringement depends on whether or not the copying is commercial in nature or for nonprofit educational purposes, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the nature of the copyrighted work. 

Consider the Perfect 10 case decided (but only in part) by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco last spring. Perfect 10 operates a Web site where subscribers pay a monthly fee to view pictures of nude models. When unauthorized full-size copies of Perfect 10?s pictures made it onto various other Web sites, the Google image search function returned thumbnail versions of the copies. Clicking on the thumbnail image then directed you to the Web site that featured the unauthorized copies of the pictures. Perfect 10 sued Google (and Amazon) in a case closely monitored by libraries, various artists guilds and societies, the Motion Picture Association of America, and various Internet coalitions.

In the decision, the court allowed as fair use Google?s display of the thumbnail images because of what was copied, why it was copied, and what Google is. Google?s actions of linking to the full-size images, however, may or may not constitute contributory infringement depending upon whether Google possesses the technological ability to, in the words of the court, ?take simple measures to prevent further damages to Perfect 10?s copyrighted works and failed to take such steps.? And even if Google loses that fight, another law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, may help Google at the retrial of the case.

Intellectual property lawyers will continue to follow this ongoing case closely, but don?t expect any firm rules to flow from its outcome. Even so, what you take, why you take it, who you are, and what technology you use are at least good starting points for ascertaining what you can and cannot legally take from the Web.

Read more here.