Rights to control intellectual property such as books and movies are protected in the United States by copyrights laws. Most of these laws were enacted well before the age of computers. Consequently, confusion prevails in legal circles about how these laws apply to materials on the internet. Here’s an example: U.S. copyright law forbids anyone from copying books or movies and then selling the copies for a profit without the permission of the owners. Book stores, for instance, can’t print their own copies of this textbook and sell them. They have to pay the publisher of this book for copies; the publisher in turn, compensates the author.
A provision n copyright law does allow fair use, in which someone may copy small portions of this book or any other protected work for such non-commercial purposes as teaching news, parody, or criticism. Fair use has also been successfully extended in recent years to people making videotaped copies of television programs for viewing later at a more convenient time. Consequently, you can copy ideas from other Web pages. But beware while copyright laws let you copy ideas here and there, they expressly forbid you to copy a sophisticated sequence of ideas.