ABSTRACT
Ever since the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, technical communicators have found themselves working in spaces where intellectual property questions are not peripheral, but central. Documents that might have once been understood as "in-house" are now subject to easy reproduction and distribution on scales unimaginable in print contexts. Because electronic storage and retrieval of documents is both speedy and cost-effective, documents function not as isolated end products but as participants in an expanding, interlinked corpus. A document hewing too closely to an online model will likely be exposed, and today's hastily borrowed piece of copyrighted clip art could well prompt tomorrow's lawsuit. Technical communication, in taking to the Web, has finally, inevitably, collided with copyright and intellectual property law. And this collision obliges technical communicators to become familiar with the laws that increasingly intersect with and impinge on their work.
