Internet Ownership Issues

Overview

The Internet has evolved rapidly since its initial inception and development in the 1950s and 1960s. From the proposal of a global network in 1960 and the subsequent connection of a handful of computers, the Internet has grown to include a vast quantity of devices that can store and send information of all types. This "Internet of things" (and the more than three billion people connected via these things) has been central to a number of ownership issues that are unique to and exacerbated by the very nature of this kind of connectivity. The Internet makes it easy to distribute information in violation of copyright. It also makes it easy for companies to access the personal information of individual users (information users believe they own), primarily for the purposes of advertising.

These issues are best understood in the context of the history of the Internet's development. The Internet was initially conceived of as a kind of library and developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET. Researchers wanted to access and share information stored on computers connected to a network. The central idea of ARPANET in the 1960s and 1970s was to construct a collective brain and be able to access that brain to find information and communicate with other users. The information made available via this collective brain was, in theory, to be freely and legally available to all. This initial goal is nicely illustrated by both the first document made available on the Internet in 1971—the copyright-free U.S. Declaration of Independence—and by the insistence of the developer of the World Wide Web that the code be freely available, which it has been since 1993.

In this sense, ownership of the Internet has always been firmly in the hands of anyone who can access to it. In 1983, this access was fairly limited, with only 1.4 percent of U.S. adults online and a handful more in other countries. However, the 1980s saw a slow growth in information availability and Internet utility, which encouraged more and more people to connect. The first Internet community was developed in 1985, allowing people to interact with each other online. Developments in the 1990s enabled better connections to be made and information to be more easily found. In 1990, the first Internet search engine was built and the first website was published. From there, using the Internet became easier, and the types of available information multiplied. The first photo was made available in 1992 followed closely by live footage from the first webcam in 1993. The ease and versatility of the Internet led to the development of an increasing number of web pages. The first Google index in 1998 had twenty-six million web pages. This number grew to more than one billion over the next twenty-plus years. These websites are now accessed by billions of people worldwide.

All Internet users access and distribute information. While some of this information may belong to the person doing the distributing, other information may not. For example, in 1999, Napster was launched, allowing people to access music held on other computers in the network and download this music onto their own devices (Brunner, 2015). This embodied the original concept of the Internet by creating an effective Internet library of music. However, it meant songs were being shared without the permission of the rightful owners of those songs. Record labels and artists started suing individuals and Napster for copyright infringement (Brunner, 2015). While all of the legal action surrounding Napster reduced it to a shadow of what it once was, other sites, like Pirate Bay, still facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing and effectively assist users to violate intellectual property laws. The files being shared on these sites are not limited to music. They include other media as well, such as movies, games, and software.

The Internet also enables individuals to take the words of others and use them as their own. While the rise of the Internet is not responsible for the advent of plagiarism, which has been taking place on university campuses since the first universities were founded (Silverman, 2015), the Internet has made plagiarism easier. Information from online sources can be easily copied and pasted verbatim into other documents. These documents include high school and college essays, postgraduate dissertations, and even peer-reviewed articles for academic journals. One study conducted at a single university found that out of hundreds of documents across multiple disciplines and levels of study, 29.06 percent had examples of plagiarism (Do Ba et al., 2017). The authors stated that while these numbers were slightly higher than other studies, they may reflect the realities of plagiarism for many universities around the world.

There are other forms of cheating that present issues of ownership but are not strictly related to plagiarism. One of these is "contract cheating." Contract cheating is when a student supplies a company or individual with the essay question or the prompt and pays to have that company or individual write the essay for them. In a student survey conducted across eight Australian universities, 814 students of the 14,086 students surveyed reported that they had engaged in some form of contract cheating (Bretag et al., 2018). In 2020–2021, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic forced many students into online learning, leading to a rise in contract cheating. Students began turning to online file sharing sites meant to help students with homework and other academic matters. They used these sites to access academic papers, especially in fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, and physics. On one website, Chegg, requests for documents in these subjects increased by more than 196 percent from August 2019 to August 2020 (Lancaster & Cotarlan, 2020).

While there are many programs available that can detect plagiarism (like Turnitin, which looks at what percentage of a student's essay is identical to information found on the Internet), contract cheating is much harder to detect using automated means. However, even though this type of cheating should be undetectable, a study that examined the effectiveness of induvial markers at identifying contract cheating found that experienced markers can correctly identify unique student work 96 percent of the time and correctly identify contract cheating 62 percent of the time (Dawson & Sutherland-Smith, 2018). This means that a combination of plagiarism detection software and rigorous engagement from critical markers may be able to reinforce rules of ownership and maintain document integrity in academia.

In a sense, file sharing and plagiarism are inherent to the decentralized system of sharing that underpins the design of the Internet. However, other issues, such as contract plagiarism, enter into issues of ownership that have to do with making money. These issues of ownership, while not by design, have developed as the Internet has evolved.

It was quickly recognized that the Internet was useful not only for communication and information gathering and sharing, but also for profit-driven endeavors, such as advertising and selling. From as early as 1993, advertisers started running clickable ads (Press, 2015). At first, advertisements were distributed haphazardly throughout the web. However, this was not an ideal method of advertising since companies could not target a specific audience. To better appeal to their audiences, advertisers started investigating their audience's interests by tracking what they were looking for on the Internet. In a history of and apology for inventing the world's first pop-up ads, Zuckerman (2014) describes how these ads evolved from the fairly simple algorithms he originally used to analyze the home pages of users to the vast personal data gathering schemes of entities like Facebook. Personal data gathering presents an issue of ownership in that companies are profiting from information that individuals generate while interacting with the Internet. While some have argued that this is simply as a violation of privacy, it can also be viewed as one entity profiting from information owned by another entity without compensation, which is similar to plagiarism, file sharing, and other ownership issues.

Further Insights

While the Internet clearly presents numerous issues relating to ownership, it is much less clear how these issues should be resolved. Centralized decision-making and legal action related to Internet issues are difficult since the Internet developed in a grassroots, decentralized way. The Internet is not owned by a single entity that operates under the rules of a single government, and it is therefore difficult for individual governments to monitor it as such. For example, torrenting sites like The Pirate Bay are still operational in 2022 in spite of legal action aimed at them. Sites that are shut down in one country or context can easily pop back up in another. While there are several global bodies associated with governing the Internet, they are viewed by some as ineffectual and viewed by others as hindering free speech. Also, while information piracy is a crime, many individual users do not see it as such. For example, a survey conducted in 2000 found that 78 percent of users who download music illegally did not think of this action as a crime (Jones & Lenhart, 2004).

Another aspect of torrenting sites that make them difficult to prosecute is that it can be argued that the site developers themselves are not committing a crime. They are providing a tool that could be used for piracy but are not necessarily engaging in piracy themselves. It has been argued that legal action should be taken against individuals downloading copyrighted material, not the sites that allow access to this material. However, it may not be worth a company's time to identify and pursue individuals committing smaller crimes. The public also seems to have this perspective. When the Swedish government raided the Pirate Bay offices in 2014, the global volume of torrent downloads taking place across the globe barely dipped (Spangler, 2014), indicating that the public did not believe legal action would extend to them.

When there is a course of legal action to be followed for a crime involving ownership, it can be difficult to determine to whom original ownership belongs. This is partly due to how quickly information spreads. By the time an ownership issue surfaces, the piece of information has most likely been distributed to any number of other devices. The vast number of devices that can access the Internet and exchange information compound this issue, increasing the difficulties of saying for certain which document on which device belonging to which user can be classified as the original.

The volume of devices also complicates ownership of personal data. Data can be collected from everything from smartphones to exercise devices. The type of information collected can include location data, fitness data, and browser history. Even Roombas, robotic devices that roll around a house vacuuming the floors, can be used to collect detailed layouts of a house (Fairfield, 2017). While most data collected claims to be for the benefit of the consumer (Roomba is more efficient when it knows the floorplan), this information can be sold to third parties for undisclosed purposes. Information that is thought to belong to an individual homeowner now has the potential to be shared with an unknown entity. Companies that "sell" digital devices still own the software and often own information that the user provides free of charge through simply using the device.

Viewpoints

The monetization of information—both in terms of copyright and advertising—has largely corrupted the initial vision of the Internet. Information is often treated as a commodity to be bought, sold, and owned instead of freely shared. However, there has been a return to the original purpose of the Internet through a number of initiatives. As when the Internet first began, these solutions come from researchers. There are a number of open access journals and documents freely published on the creative commons. Documents that are licensed under the creative commons have a copyright that allows them to be used freely for noncommercial purposes as long as the document is properly referenced and the author acknowledged. Initiatives such as these return the Internet to the original model of free information exchange.

While the de-monetization of information itself is slowly gaining momentum, getting rid of advertising that uses data provided by users is more difficult. It is natural for people who spend time and energy developing something to expect to eventually get paid for it. Companies that provide a platform to access free information often opt to advertise to see some monetary reward. It is unlikely that those who seek to financial gain from the Internet will ever commit to freeing it. In fact, Ethan Zuckerman, who developed the first pop-up ads (and condemned them) also suggests that ads and data mining have allowed the Internet to become what it is. Ads allow people free access to information and services while still allowing companies who support those pages to profit. Zuckerman argues that in order to retain ownership of personal information, the best alternative is for users to pay for the sites they use (Fahy, 2015). Services with user fees, such as Pinboard, are slowly growing as more and more users opt to retain ownership of their personal information by paying a small fee. Other services, like ad blockers, free the Internet of advertisements for users willing to pay. While these users still have their personal data mined, the corresponding ads never reach the user, effectively defeating the purpose of this kind of information collection.

Bibliography

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Dawson, P., & Sutherland-Smith, W. (2018). Can markers detect contract cheating? Results from a pilot study. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(2), 286–293. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2017.1336746

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Tracey Bretag, T., Harper, R., Burton, M., Ellis, C., Newton, P., Rozenberg, P., Saddiqui, S. & van Haeringen, K. (2018). Contract cheating: A survey of Australian university students. Studies in Higher Education. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2018.1462788