This makes perfect sense when it comes to novels or paintings or photographs. In one case Bagley describes, a court held that a software program stored only in RAM is sufficiently fixed to constitute a copy. The defendant, an independent computer service operator retained to do repairs, had called for the list of error messages to be displayed on-screen. The court held that the operator was reading the message for a commercial purpose, namely to fix the error, and therefore had violated the copyright of the company that wrote the software program. When you move to the World Wide Web, as everyone seems to be doing, the dangers of copyright infringement lurk behind every home page.
Web browsers make it all too easy to copy and paste protected material.
A recent court decision provides a clue to the way the courts are looking at electronic copyright infringement. In this case, a former minister of the Church of Scientology uploaded church documents to an electronic bulletin board. The bulletin board uploaded them to Netcom, an Internet access provider, which in turn automatically distributed them to other boards. A federal judge in California said no, not for direct infringement. The Netcom court declined to follow an earlier case, in which another federal court had held that a bulletin board service was liable for copyright infringement when a subscriber uploaded photographs from Playboy.