ABSTRACT
The reality is that the Internet is pretty wild, but the law of each and every country, state, province, county, municipality, town, and borough applies to the Internet, and its most-famous aspect, the World Wide Web. The law deals with Internet legal issues by analyzing each element that goes into a Web site as if the element were by itself. This chapter discusses legal issues that webmasters should be aware of under US law and copyright, privacy and contract law as they apply to Web sites. Copyright law is designed to protect “expressions” of ideas, while making available to others the underlying ideas, facts, and information. Key to an understanding of copyright law is the terms that Congress uses in the Copyright Act. Copyright law automatically protects any copyrightable work that is “fixed in a tangible medium of expression”. In the copyright context, the term “public domain” means that nobody owns or has a claim to a particular copyrightable work.
