图形互联网著作权.docVIP

外文文献原文 When the graphical Web entered into the public scene in 1994, it was followed by an almost literal explosion of available content. The number of internet hosts had seen a steady increase since the 1980s, from 231 in 1981 to more than a million in 1992. However, after 1994 the increase is marked, with the number of hosts reaching just under 30 million machines by 1998.18 In December 1995, Altavista had indexed just over 20 million text documents, while by June 1999 it counted 150 million.19 Such an explosion responded to the vast amount of users and companies discovering the Net for the first time, and posting as much content as they could. It could be argued that this presented a golden era for human creativity and inventiveness, as people where faced with a democratic publishing environment where anybody with an Internet account and some technical knowledge could upload anything they wanted. The gatekeepers of human creativity were gone. Why has the graphical Internet been so important to copyright law? It could be argued that the modern Web has prompted changes in the legislation, just like any other new technology causes the law to evolve. But the Internet’s impact in copyright goes further than that. The Internet has made copyright more relevant and important to the mainstream. In the past, copyright was something that happened to a few people. Writers, artists, publishers and movie-makers were interested in copyright, but it could be argued that the general public paid little attention to it, unless they decided to become creators, and often not even then. The Internet has brought a change to all that by turning everyone who uses the network into a potential publisher. The emergence of free web space in the shape of “cyber towns” like Geocities and Tripod7 allowed knowledgeable users to publish their own website. This liberty has been enhanced by the ease of setting up web logs (blogs), uploading pictures online, posting on web forums and creating and ge