Table of Contents
Publishing on the Internet is not just a matter of hardware and software. This chapter addresses some publishing issues of which you need to be aware. Publishing on the Internet is as much of an advance today as the invention of the encylopedia was in its day. The encylopedia brought much of the knowledge of the world to one set of books. The Internet, especially Gopher, WWW, and WAIS, can take you to a new world each day. If your Internet search on a subject one day yields nothing interesting, the same search a day or two later might well bring several new sources. (In fact, searching the Internet through different indexes on the same day will yield different sources, just because no one index covers everything.)
Publishing on the Internet is so simple and inexpensive (relative to traditional publishing techniques) that many who would not previously have considered it will find themselves in the publishing business.
The Internet is a new medium for publishers. That means all the rules aren't set and the full potential isn't known.
You can put pictures and text together on the Internet, just as you can in magazines, newspapers, and books, but on the Internet you can publish a lot more. Your files can include sounds and movie clips. Users can run programs from your server to search, calculate interest rates, or make animated figures jump around on the screen. The Internet offers possibilities never before considered in a publishing medium.
This will be disappointing to the control freaks among us, but the appearance of your documents will vary from browser to browser, and not everyone will start at the beginning of your home page or at the top level of your Gopher server. Because of the open nature of Gopher and WWW, it's possible for a person browsing your server to save the links to the parts of your server that they find most useful. And if they pass those links on, or others get them through index searches, they'll return to your server directly at the point that most interests them, which may not be where you expected at all. Your access logs might show you where this is happening, but they still don't let you control it.
Once a book or a magazine comes off the presses, it's done. There may be revisions, or later editions of a book, but not anytime soon. With the Internet everything is changing all the time. Even your own server. I guarantee it. The constant change is both advantageous and problematic. One advantage is that you can constantly update your material without incurring large reprint expenses. On the other hand, you'll have to spend a significant amount of time maintaining links to other servers and updating your own material.
Although print technology has advanced quickly in recent years
(remember when color pictures first appeared in newspapers?),
the speed of change is much greater and much more apparent on
the Internet, as with anything having to do with computers. This
is an advantage because many more tools are constantly being made
available. However, keeping up with the technology can be time-consuming.
More than any other medium, the Internet provides ways to get rapid feedback from your readers. In fact, the real wealth of the Internet is the knowledge and experience that all the participants around the world bring to the table. Usenet News, Internet Relay Chat (see Chapter 6), and Gopher and Web forms give you access to that knowledge and experience. Think about how to take advantage of it.
Distance simply is not a factor when someone has Internet access. So your words will be available worldwide at no extra cost to you. This international aspect of the Internet is what's most often ignored by those in the United States. Not all servers are in English. But leapfrogging geography leads to one of the great pluses of the Internet: it's possible to build a community where there isn't one geographically. People from all over the world meet via mailing lists, Usenet News, Internet Relay Chat, and HyperNews to discuss their favorite subjects.
More than anything else, the ability to include information from other sites and servers makes the Internet truly a new medium. A footnote in a book or a citation in a magazine take a certain amount of effort and energy to follow up on. But links in Web pages or Gopher sites are so simple to follow that a reader who isn't paying attention may not even notice where all the items are coming from. Thus you could establish a new server about a particular subject, not because you're an expert on that subject but because you've tracked down links to a number of sites that do have experts. And given the Net's interactive nature, you can expand such a site through the contributions of the users. And then you can develop the expertise which you went searching for in the first place.
Let me start this section by stating that I am not a lawyer, and the opinions expressed here are no substitute for competent legal counsel. See Table 9-1 for other sources, including the invaluable Copyright FAQ by Terry Carroll.
Copyright is how authors protect themselves from unauthorized copying of their work. There is tremendous concern on all fronts about what copyright means and how it can be enforced in an environment like the Internet, where something has to be copied just to be viewed. And it is difficult if not impossible to ensure that it is not redistributed illicitly by the recipient.
Although legal challenges and changes to existing copyright statutes may help us adapt to the digital age, some facts are not in dispute.
Copyright law does apply to the Internet. The United States and most other countries consider original material copyrighted as soon as it is created and "fixed in a tangible medium." Text on Gopher, WWW, and WAIS servers (as well as e-mail) is considered a tangible medium and thus fulfills that criterion. Copyright protection is granted with or without a copyright notice.
Nonetheless, you should place a copyright notice on work on the Internet. U.S. law does not require a copyright notice, but giving copyright notice is an announcement of your intention to protect your rights. Clearly marking material as copyrighted makes it harder for someone to claim innocent infringement as a defense. And some countries do require the copyright notice.
If you own the copyright to something that you or someone else wishes to publish on the Internet, make sure it is labeled as copyrighted material, with you as the copyright holder. Specify what, if anything, you consider reasonable use of that material. Some of what is available on the Internet is in the public domain. But the presumption that if it's on the Internet, it's free for the taking is false. This is not true, and labeling your material as copyrighted is an important step in changing that presumption and the public perception of the protection of copyright materials.
Proper copyright notice reads simply:
© John Doe 1995
Given that someone can easily link to just one item in your Gopher, Web, or WAIS server, it would seem appropriate to repeat the copyright notice with each document or file, although U.S. law does not require this. Your copyright protection for original work is the same whether you've given notification or not, but the deterrent effect is greater if each document has its own notice. Using a copyright notice may give you certain advantages in court. In addition, different documents and images will often have different copyright owners, which should be noted. Finally, with the massive indexing by Archie, Veronica, Lycos, the Web Crawler, InfoSeek, Yahoo, and so on, a significant percentage of the browsers reaching your site will not be coming in through your home page. Instead they'll be landing at some document deep in your hierarchy that matched their search criteria. They may never see your home page, so if that's the only place the copyright notice sits, you'll lose whatever deterrent effect such a notice offers.
Make sure you have written permission for any copyrighted material you put on your server. If it's your own material, put your copyright label on it. Do not copy other people's material into your site without their written permission. This applies to e-mail postings too. If you appropriate copyrighted material for use on your server, you could be infringing on someone's copyright.
Using someone's copyrighted material and giving that person credit does not satisfy copyright law. Copyright is about authors' having control of where their work is copied and being compensated for the use of their works. U.S. copyright law states clearly: "Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission."
A legal exception to copyright law is "fair use" for certain purposes, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use has definite (although not always clear) limits, however. The U.S. Copyright Office lists four determining factors:
The distinction between "fair use" and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. <gopher://marvel.loc.gov:70/00/copyright/fls/fl102>
If you can't find the copyright owner to get permission, don't use the material. There are limits to what is considered a reasonable effort to locate the copyright owner, but you may have to prove that you made sufficient effort in court, which takes time and money. Consult a copyright lawyer if you cannot find the owner and want to use the material anyway.
With modern graphics tools it is becoming easier to embed a small text copyright notice within an image instead of just placing the notice in text below the image (on Web servers). Gopher and WAIS servers have no provision for sending text alongside an image, so the only way to include a copyright notice is to embed it in the image.
You do face the problem of the need to include the copyright notice on the work and the damage to the image involved in overwriting part of the image with the copyright notice. The aesthetic considerations notwithstanding, embedding the copyright notice in the image would seem to be preferable. Even so, embedding offers limited protection because the notice can be stripped from the image. For additional information about image protection, see Digital Watermarks in Chapter 11.
It is a myth that by not defending a copyright from infringement the material passes into the public domain. The only ways for copyrighted material to pass into the public domain are for the author to explicitly waive all rights to it or for the copyright to expire. The U.S. copyright lasts 50 years past the author's death if the work was created after 1977. However, certain time limits may apply to filing suits for copyright infringement.
International copyright does not exist, but many countries abide by copyright agreements between countries and through international conventions, principally the Berne Convention, to which the United States is a signatory. It is always wise to check the copyright laws of the countries concerned in specific cases and to consult a knowledgeable attorney. The U.S. Copyright Act is available online, thanks to the Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University. LII also provides related materials from the Berne Convention, U.S. Supreme Court copyright decisions since 1990, and links to related online information on copyright law. <http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/copyright.html> Hopefully other nation's copyright laws will soon be available online as well.
Be aware that the material you put on the Internet is going to be available in more than 60 countries. In addition to determining in which languages you should make your documents and menus available, you'll want to
The Internet is a different medium, and the rules and potential have not been fully explored. It differs from print media in many ways. For one, the Internet gives you the ability to constantly update or revise what you publish. Unlike print media, revisions involve little extra expense, just the labor to make the changes. The technology is also constantly changing, sometimes within months or weeks. You will find that new tools and capabilities are arriving constantly, so you will need to allocate time to keep abreast of these changes.
Interactivity is one aspect of Internet publishing that is easy to lose sight of. If you provide for it, users can download and view material from your server, upload comments and fill out online surveys or participate in chat sessions, or simply give e-mail feedback. Ignore the interactive nature of the Internet at your peril.
Finally, geography can simply disappear. The Internet makes it possible to build a community around a subject or theme, regardless of geography. If only 20 people in the world are interested in your subject and they all live in different places, you won't be getting together for dinner. But by using a central Web, Gopher, or WAIS server, as well as e-mail mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups, you can unite your efforts. At the same time, there are times when it is appropriate to emphasize geography, such as publishing oral histories from your community, local maps, and tourist information.
Although the Internet is a different publishing medium, copyright laws still apply. Because publishing on the Internet fulfills the legal criterion of being "fixed in a tangible medium," most material is copyrighted automatically as soon as it appears. You should, however, place a copyright notice on your work as an announcement of your intention to protect your rights. This applies to images as well as text. It is probably better to embed your copyright notice in your images so that it cannot be deleted if someone copies the images out of context.
While you should protect your own copyrighted material, you should also respect the copyright rights of others and never use someone else's material without permission. Don't assume that because there's no copyright notice, it's free to use as you want. Acknowledging the source of the material is not enough.
International copyright protection is not guaranteed even though many countries have signed international copyright agreements such as the Berne Convention. Be aware that the material you put on the Internet will be available in more than 60 countries, so you need to avoid local geographic references and slang that won't make sense to others. Also avoid making cultural assumptions about your audience. They will come from all over the world.