Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property

As I begin this narrative, readers will have to understand that I have been and always will be a Trekkie. The very first movie I was ever taken to see was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. I was six months old and I did nothing but scream the entire time, but the fascination has nonetheless been there my entire life, and there is no twelve-step program to help me recover. That having been said, you might have some degree of understanding when I say that Viacom’s attempts in 1997 to eliminate all use of copyrighted material on fan sites, ranging from still pictures to movie and sound clips to the logos themselves, was war for me. For Viacom, the issue was that these copyrighted images were used at all. This spawned a whole host of further crackdowns and lawsuits in similar kingdoms of fanatics across the web.

The situation I just described to you, while probably not the best example of the internet’s general abuse of intellectual property, is one of the earliest examples. Proper accreditation and documentation is a widespread problem on the internet, particularly now that the internet has grown in use and popularity. The internet hosts websites that directly violate the concept of intellectual property in ways that no other tool ever can. If copyrighted graphics or sound appear on any website trying to convey a message, particularly if these are recognizable to an average member of the site’s target audience, the validity of that argument is subconsciously undermined by the unaccredited presence of someone else’s ideas.

For web writers, one solution to this dilemma seems to be to avoid copyrighted material as much as possible and create original content. “This content does not need to be entirely dissimilar from a copyrighted work you would have liked to use. Copyright law protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves” (Farkas & Farkas 349). But this solution creates problems with recreational forms of websites. Those built by fans of a popular TV show, for instance, have no personal photos of their favorite actors and actresses and inevitably rely on scanned publicity photos and content from official sites to populate their galleries and create their custom graphics. This example might then fall under the fair use defense, which “has to make the case that [use] of the copyrighted work of another should be legally permitted, notwithstanding the copyright owner's exclusive rights in her work” (George Washington).