Fair use

The World Wide Web is an easy target for cynicism --- and rightly so.

Admittedly, there are some areas where rights are better-defined and value judgments are less in dispute. For instance, notwithstanding all the loopholes and the absence of laws to prosecute offenders, any rational man would say that cybercrime, in general, is not to be condoned. Or that online pornography is offensive to human sensibilities.

But fair use tells a different story. It involves the weighing of conflicting freedoms that may be hard to reconcile. And since it pits a copyright owner’s proprietary rights against a supposed societal benefit (i.e. proliferation of knowledge), it is hard to tell which is more important --- private rights, or a generalized gain. Restricting a copyright owner’s private rights may stifle his desire for creative pursuits; penalizing the use of links to access copyrighted material on the Web may mean a concomitant loss of Internet freedom. Taken together, these restrictions and infringements, coupled with the precedents they create, may add up to a considerable loss of information liberties. In the Internet, where the concept of freedom is built into the very idea of learning beyond frontiers, any attempt to restrict it will surely be resisted.

All told, the Internet serves up a premise that is hard to refute --- that powerful as it is dangerous, the vast and intriguing landscape that the Internet has introduced for us must be embraced in its entirety, with all its complications and implications --- the informative and the destructive, the picturesque and the pornographic, the legal and the not-so-legal.

Depending on which side you’re in, the World Wide Web may very well be “Tragedy of the Commons” at its worst, or information technology at its best.