Rod Pemberton said:
"...everything you see on the web is copyrighted, unless expressly dedicated
to the public domain" is untrue.
Well *most* countries have a copyright law and it *usually* says
copyright is automatic and implicit. Most (but not all) countries have a
reciprocal agreement on copyright. So *most* things on the Internet
automatically fall under a copyright law.
However most counties have vehicle speed limits on the roads... likewise
there is nothing to stop anyone putting up some one else's copyright
work.
Everything that is within physical US
jurisdiction on the web is copyrighted by law.
But only US law which is irrelevant outside the physical area of the US.
However some things on web sites in the US may be illegal or breaking US
or someone else's copyright in the first place.
BTW The "generally accepted agreement" is that the law of the country
the server is in has jurisdiction no matter where the item is uploaded
from.
The problem is getting the country concerned to do something about it.
China and Russia are notoriously bad at co-operating.
There are many places in the
world where US laws don't apply.
Everywhere outside the US.... despite what the US military think
You can "sign in" to libraries, e.g.,
Russian, online and access volumes of digital copyrighted material legally
just as if you entered the library by foot.
There is as probably much copy righted material available illegally in
the US as anywhere else. (there is certainly more spam from the US than
anywhere else, Florida I think is the main hot spot.)
Just because there are laws does not mean that they are observed. It is
not helped by the indirect influence of FSF and GNU. They have created a
sort of climate where people expect things for free. Especially software
and documentation. It was not their intention hence the GPL but the
result is that people seem to expect books and SW for free. I once go
stung buying a book on open source only to discover 3 months later that
it was legally available as a PDF for free....
