Copyrights.

One of the most difficult areas of any form of communication is dealing with and understanding copyright laws of intellectual property. And it seems that, even for lawyers, the rules are not crystal clear. Sam Tirilli, who is a lawyer and a professor at the University of Miami, spoke to my Online Journalism class about this issue, yesterday.

At the core of the debate about intellectual property copyrights is the understanding of the difference between physical and non-physical objects and how they are distributed. A digital file can be duplicated an infinite number of times without the original piece of work being harmed, removed, or altered in any way. At the same time all the digital copies will be as good as the original, or at least they will be if copied correctly. This is a major change from the days of VHS. Whereas a movie copied onto video tape looses some of its quality, a digitally copied movie does not.

When discrepancies over the use of copyrighted material end up going to court, two acts serve as the guidelines for judges. These are The Digital Millennium Rights Act of 2002 and The Communication Decency Act of 1996. Of course any trial is a very complex matter, and this is a simplification.

What these acts do is place liability when the rules of copyrights or defamation are violated. The Digital Millennium Rights Act of 2002 frees providers of online space of any liability for law infringements users not associated with the company might cause. If YouTube, for instance, does not know that copyrighted material unrightfully has been uploaded to their space, they are not to blame for it. However, the copyright holder can tell them to remove the material and then they will have to do so. But until then, they are protected by The Digital Millennium Rights Act.

Though most of The Communication Decency Act of 1996 was deemed unconstitutional, one section was passed. This section, Section 2.30, is central to many types of websites' existence. This section states that internet providers are immune when it comes to what other people post on their sites. If someone writes defamatory remarks about you, you therefore should go after the person writing it and not the site hosting it. While Section 2.30 allows many websites of questionable substance or relevance to survive and strive the act also protects people from liability in cases where they have no control over the substance on their sites.

Both acts are pivotal to the way these kinds of cases are being determined. And with good reason, I would argue. It is impossible for this site; Blogger, for instance, to check all the blogs daily for defamatory material or copyright infringements.