IT and IP

There has been a constant increase in the dependence of people in the internet. With the surge of its use, come also problems which our legislature could not have foreseen years ago. One of which is the plethora of new issues in intellectual property law.
The technology of the Internet provides a new medium for dissemination of information, and such posts numerous challenges to the traditional norms upon which our intellectual property law are based. Framers of our intellectual property laws could not have fathom what the today’s technology and internet provide as the nearly effortless and essentially perfect duplication and dissemination of works such as books, pictures, audio-visual material and other authorship for which intellectual property law provides certain exclusive rights to owners. While scribbling on paper is becoming an obsolete tradition, protection of digital works are fast becoming a concern. Issues of authorship and proof thereof are also a huge concern.
The peculiar situation created by the internet also gave rise to litigious circumstances. Numerous legal actions have been brought involving Internet issues, and the pace seems to be accelerating. Of particular interest is a set of copyright actions recently brought by software publishers against Internet service providers (ISPs) and Internet users. (Let theLitigation Begin: Software Publishers Go to War Against the Internet, 4 Information L. Alert (October 25, 1996). As reported therein, the Software Publishers Association, on behalf of Adobe Systems, Claris, and Traveling Software, has filed suit against Web companies whose users allegedly provide means for software piracy over the Internet. Such means include serial numbers that will make operable commercial software otherwise protected from use by non-licensees, programs that obviate such protection schemes, and links to Internet “FTP” sites where piratical versions of commercial software are available. These actions apply a theory of “contributory” or “vicarious” liability for copyright infringement, in which the defendant may not be the person who directly infringes a copyright. The issue of contributory infringement for ISPs and bulletin board operators has been addressed before, with the result that in some circumstances, these parties may be held liable for infringement if they knew that infringing works were being uploaded on their systems and refused to remove them. See, e.g., Religious Technology Ctr. v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc., 907 F. Supp. 1361 (N.D. Cal. 1995), Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. MAPHIA, 857 F. Supp. 679 (N.D. Cal. 1994); Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Frena, 839 F. Supp. 1552 (M.D. Fla. 1993).
With the fast developments in technology, we cannot afford our intellectual property law to remain stagnant. As Thomas Jefferson once said “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy ...”