What if you were an amateur poet or a children's story teller, or even someone who worked hard all summer growing the most beautiful roses and you thought you’d share your tales or pictures of your garden with people and friends you met on the Internet. You even decided to contact your Internet Service Provider (hereinafter called ISP), and purchased your own domain name in order to make your web site an even more personal and intimate affair. After all, these are YOUR stories and YOUR pictures right?
You’re now in the process of creating your masterpiece to share with the rest of the world. You’ve done your research, learned to scan your photos, placed them on your page and successfully uploaded the entire project. You can now sit back and start looking forward to receiving the accolades and praise you believe you so richly deserve after doing all that work.
Instead, what if a few weeks down the line you begin to notice that many of your beautiful pictures are showing up all over the net with no mention of your name anywhere in sight. Not only that but the lovely poem you composed about the day your first child Emily was born is being handed from one person to the other via email and someone actually had the nerve to change the name of your child to Gertrude! But that’s not all, just to add insult to injury, your ISP has advised you that your quota of 50 hits a day has escalated to 250 an hour. They politely state that even though the counter on your site says you never received more that 10 visitors a day, unless you agree to pay them hundreds of dollars more a month, they can no longer afford to host your site. After all, now that you’ve become so popular you should be able to afford to help them pay for their costs of maintaining such a bustling site.
In other words, regardless of where they found it if someone downloaded your work without telling you and without giving you credit for it, they are in clear violation of the "Copyright Law" just as much as if they were distributing it at the local mall.
The same goes for linking directly to work that is located on another site or URL (Bandwidth Robbery). Bandwidth is the measure of how much information can flow in and out of a system at any given time. What if your ISP and you agreed to start you off at 50 hits a day and suddenly your site is getting more visits than your ISP can support without penalizing the hundreds of other sites they already host. If you’ve become that popular, your server has no choice but to ask you to share in the cost up upgrading if necessary and/or maintaining their system.
All artists around the Net have this problem. It is hardly an isolated issue, but people still think that if they can get away with it, why bother telling anyone. Nowadays, nothing is easier than to download a graphic or song onto a disk or even highlighting an especially intriguing text, to then copy it somewhere else either for distribution or show. But by doing this, you are robbing the original owner of not only the distinction of being the creator but of the pleasure of knowing if his or her hard work is being appreciated and enjoyed and if so by how many?
Furthermore, remember that the Copyright Law clearly states that the author of the material has the RIGHT to control where and how his or her work is being used. If you do not tell the artist that you have copied their property, then again you are in violation of the law.
A simple rule of thumb is, if it’s located on a web page it belongs to the person who wrote it unless otherwise stipulated. Even though many sites offer free graphics, midis, texts and javascript to download, you are only borrowing it and must advise the author of your intentions, in writing, as well as provide them with your URL so that they can view it for themselves. You must also clearly state who created the original work in any manner asked of you by the owner. If you fail to do so you automatically become liable, and leave the originator of the work with little choice but to take legal action against you.
Lastly, it is also clearly stated that the originator or artist has the right to protect the integrity of his or her work with respect to civil remedies if he or she has reason to believe that the original work in question has been electronically or digitally altered in any way without their expressed permission. Which means that no work can be downloaded with the intention of altering the style, crop or change the image to suit your individual needs or preferences.
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