Questions of Ownership in Digital Media and the Internet

This week, I chose to look at intellectual property and copyright issues – probably not the most exciting ethical issue, but one I found interesting based on our discussions around how the internet is rapidly changing our world. In his book The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly presents his understanding of these changes, and describes several forces that are creating them. Throughout most of Kelly’s forces, one of his underlying concepts is the exponential increase in the sharing of data and information on a scale unfathomable just 20 or 30 years ago. He writes: “as far as I can tell, the impossible things happening now are in every case due to the emergence of a new level of organization that did not exist before. These incredible eruptions are the result of large-scale collaboration, and massive real-time social interacting, which in turn are enabled by omnipresent instant connection between billions of people at a planetary scale” (Kelly, 2016, p.273). This is the world our students live in, and as the oldest of them next school year will have been born in 2002, it is the only world they have ever known. The ubiquitous copying and sharing of data and information will continue to be transformational for us as humans, but raises many questions when it comes to intellectual property and copyrights, digital ethics, and education.

With this idea of sharing of information in mind, I decided to review a court case that had a role in creating the internet we experience today. Religious Technology Center v. Netcom (1995) was a case that pitted the Church of Scientology against Netcom, an internet service provider that hosted internet data on its servers. A user named Dennis Erlich had posted hyperlinks on Usenet newsgroup (kind of like an early message board) to writings by L. Ron Hubbard that were not meant for public release and were only available to high-level members of the church. However, in this lawsuit, the church sued the company, Netcom, saying that they should have know that Erlich was linking to copyrighted material, and therefore were guilty in not taking it down. In his ruling, the judge concluded that this was an unreasonable expectation in both that 1) Netcom should not have to assume that its users were illegally sharing copyrighted information and 2) Netcom’s servers were merely acting as a “conduit” for information to flow, and to screen all hosted information would be an onerous task. In an analysis of the case a year later, Eugene Burcher and Anna Hughes noted that “[t]he preliminary injunction request was also overly broad, having a potentially chilling effect on free speech on…Netcom’s…systems,” assuming that a victory for the church would have required ISPs to screen all content and make a judgement on whether content was within fair use or not. They also recognized the significance of the case: “[b]ecause this is a case of first impression of ISP liability for copyright infringement by one of its subscribers, it will set the standard for the near future on how ISP’s operate; possibly the entire Internet…. [T]he standards set by this opinion will establish the framework for future actions of copyright infringement on the Internet.” In essence, this case freed internet users to share information online however they wanted, with no limits imposed by the ISPs where the information was stored. However, it not mean that sharing of information would not have consequences for individuals, only that they were free to do it.

I very much agree with the court’s decision, as I feel like internet is best left as a democratized system not overseen by central authority or authorities (in this case, the ISPs being required to control information). But just as the analysis I referred to suggests, this does not mean I feel the internet should be the wild west with no rules at all. As Kelly noted in his book, “how we handle rewards for innovation, intellectual property rights and responsibilities, ownership of and access to the copies [of data and information] makes a huge difference to society’s prosperity and happiness. Ubiquitous copying is inevitable, but we have significant choices about its character” (Kelly, 2016, p.256). We collectively need to decide what degree of access is allowable and tenable. Religious Technology Center v. Netcom (1995) did not solve all issues of internet copyright infridgement — since then, there have been debates about peer-to-peer file sharing, DMCA notice scare tactics, and the embedding of social media, to name a few. In schools, this has implications for how we share information, such as on social media, but also on how we teach and model internet use to students. The concepts of not stealing work from content creators (even though Google, etc. make it very easy and tempting) and creating accurate, well-researched work are just as much about digital ethics are they are about providing clear guidelines and lessons to students. Our job should be to train students in digital citizenship while also adjusting to the constantly changing digital ethics that govern the internet and social media.

Burcher, Eugene A. & Anna M. Hughes. (1996). Casenote, Religious Tech. Ctr. v. Netcome On-Line Communications, Inc.: Internet Service Providers: The Knowledge Standard for Contributory Copyright Infringement and The Fair Use Defense. Retrieved from http://www.richmond.edu/jolt/v3i1/burhugh.html.

Ginsburg, Jane. (2006). Secondary Liability for Copyright Infringement in the U.S.: Anticipating the Aprés-Grokster. Columbia Law School. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20060914165411/http://www.law.columbia.edu/law_school/communications/reports/winter06/facforum1.

Kelly, Kevin. (2016). The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

Manishin, Glenn. (2019). How Social Media Continues to Disrupt Internet Copyright Law. Disruptive Competitive Project. Retrieved from http://www.project-disco.org/intellectual-property/011819-how-social-media-continues-to-disrupt-internet-copyright-law/#.XQw_iIhKjIU.

National Public Radio. (n.d.). NPR Ethics Handbook: Accuracy. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/about-npr/688139552/accuracy#usinginformationfromnonnprsources.

Sieminski, Paul. (2014). Corporations Abusing Copyright Laws Are Ruining the Web for Everyone. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2014/01/internet-companies-care-fair-use/.

Stroud, Matt. (2014). These Six Lawsuits Shaped the Internet. The Verge. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/19/6044679/the-six-lawsuits-that-shaped-the-internet.

Vinjamuri, David. (2011). Ethics and the Five Deadly Sins of Social Media. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2011/11/03/ethics-and-the-5-deadly-sins-of-social-media/#71b2c18b3e1f.

Whyte, Ronald M. (1995). Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-line Communication Services, Inc., 907 F Supp. 1361 (N.D. Cal 1995). Retrieved from https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/907_FSupp_1361.htm.