ABSTRACT
Probably the first thing to remember about the Internet is that it is very largely a phenomenon of the richer, developed part of the world. This is hardly surprising, of course. In 1997, 96 per cent of Internet hosts were located in the 27 (now 29) countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), according to V Keenan, Guardian, 13 May 1997, cited by Williams and Nicholas (2001). Also noteworthy is the dominance of the English (including American) language. Around 90 per cent of the computers connected to the Internet are in English-speaking countries. More than half (60 per cent) of the messages now passed are in English (though that is down from 85 per cent in 1996), and eighty per cent of home pages are in English. (These figures were given in The Times, 19 March 2001.) Obviously the situation will change, and probably fairly quickly. In particular, the vast home and overseas Chinese population will bring Chinese into the statistics (it is easy enough to input data in the Chinese script). However, for the time being at any rate, it would seem likely that the problems of the Internet are seen very largely through Western eyes, and the solutions are likely to be those which would occur to people brought up in the Western, and specifically British or US, legal traditions. It cannot be too strongly stressed that what applies to copyright in material distributed in other forms, applies equally to material distributed on the Internet. The special problems arise over enforcement.
