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One of the interesting aspects of the Internet is the ease with which things can be copied.
There are a number of rights that arise in relation to copyright. The most notorious of these rights is the right to reproduce a work. This right gives the owner of the copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the work. There are a number of other rights associated with copyright, including the right to distribute a work, the right to display a work in public and the right to make derivative works. These are the exclusive right of the owner.
It is not necessary to reproduce the whole of a work to infringe the copyright in the work. However, the rights of the owner are not without limitation. There are certain "fair use" exemptions to the these rights.
All of these same principles apply to material that is on the Internet. It is unsafe to assume that any particular material on the Internet can be copied without infringing the rights of the copyright owner.
Internet law is a branch of law that encompasses a number of different areas of law as they related to activity occuring over the Internet. Those areas of law include general commercial law, privacy law, copyright law, trademark law, domain name law, defamation and tax.
What is interesting about the Internet is that its development permits many different ways for individuals and organizations to interact with one another. For example, the Internet permits individuals to easily reach any number of other indiviuals around the World. On the other hand, much of the law relating to the Internet was developed before the Internet existed. This can create difficulties when activities on the Internet are shoe-horned into laws that were developed without the Internet in mind.
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