RE. Copyright and the Web?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Mike Buckler wonders <<Does anyone have any thoughts on the practice of
displaying a web page where part of the content is taken from a page on
another unrelated web site? Today I discovered a web page that consisted of
two frames. The upper frame contained a banner ad and information about that
particular web site. The lower frame contained a copy of one of my own pages
from my web site.>>

Caveat: I'm not a lawyer, but I've read enough copyright legislation to
venture an opinion.

Although the Web standard is to permit _linking_ to another person's page,
just as regular copyright law lets you quote someone (if you acknowledge the
quote and a few other requirements related to fair use), it's doubtful that
this practice qualifies. The problem is one of deception, intentional or
otherwise: if a typical reader can be expected to misread the myriad labels
clogging the browser window and thus not notice that it's _your_ Web page,
this practice arguably constitutes a copyright violation. Unfortunately,
there are countless mitigating or exacerbating factors: for example, if the
link that takes you to your page says "fascinating information from Mike
Buckler's site", that would seem to be a fair acknowledgment of your
copyright; conversely, if the other site somehow filters the HTML to remove
your address or copyright information, that's a pretty clear case of
copyright violation.

The standard way to avoid this issue, which is trivially easy to implement
in standard HTML, is to get the browser to open an entirely new browser
window when it follows the link. That way, your own site's window stays open
in the background (so readers can return to it quickly), but the linked site
opens in its own window. This is analogous to reading a book, seeing a
citation, and opening the book being quoted to the right page rather than
reading the excerpted quote.

What can you do about this? Probably not much. A polite request might solve
the problem, but if it doesn't, you might have to go to the people hosting
the site (the URL will tell often you that, but if not, you can track them
down through the people who award site names) or even initiate legal action
to resolve the problem. And you haven't formally registered copyright, you
can get a cease and desist order at the cost of great time and expense, but
relatively minimal damages.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer