As you read this article, you are breaching our intellectual property rights. It's not your fault: it's because of the way internet browsers work. This page is saved to your PC in a "cache."

When you visit major search engines, you often have the option to look at a copy of our pages stored on their servers.

You can visit websites the primary business purpose of which is to store copies of third parties' websites.

Each of these is in direct breach of our terms and conditions, and in breach of copyright laws in almost every country where there are laws to protect our rights in our protected material.

The internet is, simply, a tool for stealing other people's intellectual property. And it's incredibly easy to do inadvertently. Or deliberately.

It's so easy, that often internet users do not even consider the implications of the re-use of material they find on the 'web. There is almost a presumption that material published on the 'web is automatically public domain. It isn't.

Only today, Malaysian newspaper The Star printed the following "The picture of the Learjet 60 on the front page of The Star yesterday was sourced from an aviation enthusiast’s website jetphotos.net and was taken by GOH WEIYANG."

Theft of copyright material is rife in the so-called "blogosphere" where entire articles are copied and pasted into websites that have no purpose except to claim to collate material with a common theme - and then run advertisements alongside them.

This is easy to do: these copyright thieves only need to set up a "Google Alert" for a specific topic, wait for Google to scan media outlets, such as The Chief Officers' Network and deliver a list of targets to their mailbox. Using quick, easy and often free blogging software, they simply highlight our text, paste it into a blank page (perhaps with their own headline so as to defeat media outlets monitoring for their own headlines) and press "publish." A moment later, it's available. Some at least admit to the source from where the material is stolen. All put revenue generating adverts - many from the dominant ad-server, Google, alongside their reproduction of the original article, thereby depriving the originator of potential revenue - and making a profit for themselves.

Many US-based websites include what they claim is a disclaimer or protection: they say something like "this material is published solely for discussion and education under Fair Use provisions of US copyright law." It's a lie: the protection does not apply to the wholesale copying and republication of material.

The entire basis of website programming is designed to facilitate the import into any webpage of any graphic from site A into site B. In the most malevolent of cases, this is used to produce fake websites into which visitors enter personal information. Just this week, Microsoft's Hotmail service, the grandfather of free web-based e-mail services, admitted that a "phishing" site had collected log-in details for an estimated one million Hotmail users and The Times reported that it had been given a link to a web location that contained more than 20,000 examples of the Hotmail data.

There is a legitimate use for this technology: many of the adverts you see on this and almost all media sites are, in fact, delivered from third party servers such as Amazon.Com, Google and various ad management companies using a simple html tag.

It is impossible to effectively protect web content - and web programming. The tug-of-war between protection of the copyright holder and protection of potential victims of fraud has swung dramatically against the copyright holder.

Using any browser of any age, anyone can simply use the "View Source" command for this page and see three discrete sets of copyrighted material: first is the platform, which is open source but the copyright is owned by EzSystems of Norway; second is the layout (the "look and feel")which is owned by Vortex Centrum Limited which commissions the site development and third is the content which also happens to be owned by Vortex Centrum Limited.

We can try to prevent users seeing the Source - but even an idiot can bypass the only way of doing that by changing some of the browser settings. We can obscure the content, but even that is difficult to manage unless all pages are identical size (they aren't: some articles are longer than others). We can make articles pop-up into a window with no address bar but the latest versions of browsers display the actual address in a protected space, the rationale being that users can see if they have been diverted to a fake site. We can obfuscate the page and the content by encryption and prevent it being saved to the local cache but, again, these devices depend on the user being totally unaware that the ways to bypass them are readily available to anyone with access to an internet search engine.

Every time you watch a video on YouTube or similar site, a copy of it is stored in your browser cache. If you want to view it, all you have to do is identify it, and find a piece of software that will play it. It's the same every time you listen to an MP3 song. But you don't even have to go to all that trouble: there are free software packages that with one or two clicks will save a copy of streamed output in any one of the most popular play-back formats. There are even two ways of saving the file: one "listens" to the audio signal passing through your sound-card and saves it as an analogue sound recording; the other actually saves a copy of the original digital file. The latter approach means that, even if the quality of the user's internet connection is poor, a digital file simply waits for the next batch of data and adds them all together without breaks, echo or other indicators of poor "line quality."

True or false? If you are tired of rubbish quality coverage of Formula One and want to watch the BBC's coverage, you can't unless you are in the UK.

Answer: it's false. If your company's servers are in the UK, then no matter where you are in the world you can watch the BBC. Not working for a multi-national? No problem: rent a connection on a shared server, log in via that and watch. The cost? Less per month than subscribers pay for sports channels over cable or satellite.

Any website with enough server capacity and speed can host streamed audio and video. The primary restriction on this is not the hardware, but the bandwidth demands of streaming media. Indeed, there have been persistent rumours, strenuously denied by all parties, that the real reason YouTube sold out to Google was that it was in serious financial difficulty because it could not pay for the bandwidth its services consumed. Certainly other, lesser, "community" sites have "gone dark" as suppliers have cut off their connections due to non-payment.

And all of the breaches of intellectual property rights outlined above are before we even begin to consider breaches occasioned by the use of file-sharing services.

We'll look at that in part two of this article, tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nigel Morris-Cotterill is Head, The Anti Money Laundering Network, the Group which publishes, inter alia, The Chief Officers' Network. He is formerly a solicitor in private practice and now specialises in systems to detect and deter financial crime. www.antimoneylaundering.net

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