The works he borrowed were from electronic works created by other users of the World Wide Web. None of these works contained copyright notices, and so John assumed that they were available for free use. 4 None of the home pages John borrowed from contained any indication that a fee was required for the viewing or commercial use of the information they contained. The producers of this information have not received a fair share of any of the profit derived from their work. John may therefore have unwittingly violated copyright law.
Rod is a computer programmer and an avid user of the Internet.
One of his job responsibilities is to oversee the help desk of a computer lab in a university setting. Rod spends a lot of time at his computer, and to while away the hours he participates in numerous discussion groups. He enjoys the lively conversations of one group in particular, a new discussion group whose conversations center around a television show about vampires. Rod finds the young ingenue who plays the lead role particularly fetching, and in the interests of promoting further discussion among this group on particular aspects of her attractiveness, Rod digitizes several nude photos of the ingenue that he scanned in from the cover feature running in the current issue of Penthouse magazine. He then posts those photos to the discussion group's public electronic bulletin board.