Gauging the influence of America's legal decisions regarding intellectual property on the World Wide Web

When tracing the history of intellectual property legislation in the United States, one notices a significant surge of legal action following the advent of the Internet. The popularity of this worldwide communications network has prompted the American government, and indeed governing bodies the world, over to pass and revise new and current legislation in attempts to define parameters for its use. After analyzing recent and/or proposed copyright legislation in Canada, Great Britain, Australia and the United States, an interplay surfaces that hints at significant US influence in this realm. This interplay begs for an assessment of this influence: to what extent have America's legal decisions regarding intellectual property on the World Wide Web impacted the formation of recent copyright legislation in the aforementioned countries?;When comparing and contrasting changes to copyright legislation among the specified countries, special attention will paid to each nation's respective approach to common areas of contention surrounding the Internet in an effort to identify specific causal relationships. In this research, the liability of Internet Service Providers and the use of devices or programs designed to electronically prevent infringement represent two of the most controversial facets of the World Wide Web. After analyzing these two areas of contention within the context of each nation's laws, the influence of US legislation, specifically, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, becomes obvious in some areas and incidental in others. Although the specific influence that this body of legislation has had on the treatment of intellectual property issues in these nations is not easily quantifiable within the context of this research, the fact that the United States invests so much in policing copyright infringement cases worldwide hints at an influence that is more than arbitrary and perhaps indicative of a larger phenomenon similar in character to Schiller's cultural imperialism thesis.