Winter 1999 Volume 17, No. 1 In the News... Editor Christopher J. Falkowski By Christopher J. Falkowski, Counsel, CSC Health Care, Inc.
[email protected] and Jeremy D. Bisdorf, http://www.michbar.org/sections/computer/ Associate, Raymond & Prokop, P.C. “As it happened, the lightning struck early. The public got a taste of interactivity on the Internet’s World Wide Web and said, ‘We’re not waiting for a better solution! Let’s go’.” — Bill Gates (cofounder and chairman of Microsoft Corporation) Web Entanglements: A Copyrights Analysis of Linking on the World Wide Web By Mario J. Fiorucci Part I: Introduction This excerpt by author Stephen Wilson encapsulates the power of the Web. It is linking that makes the WWW web- In June 1998, Matrix Information and Directory Ser- like, with documents seamlessly referencing and cross-refer- vices reported that there were 102 million people access- encing each other. The result is that browsing the WWW dif- ing the Internet in the world. They estimate this number fers fundamentally from traditional means of research, in that will increase to 707 million by the year 2001.1 There is no it is inherently non-linear. Users can jump from one document doubt this astonishing growth is due in large part to the to another, following a unique course on an indirect pathway 4 World Wide Web (‘WWW’ or ‘Web’). The dramatic through cyberspace. However, WWW linking raises some in- growth the Web has experienced in recent years has teresting legal questions. Does the provision of a link impli- transformed the Internet from