NEW YORK — Shannon Burnett's unofficial Web site for Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans used to offer video clips and insights into plot and characters.
No longer. Corporate lawyers took care of that with a complaint of copyright violation. Burnett removed the material, though she believed she had legal grounds for using them.
"You look at the fact that this is 20th Century Fox," Burnett said. "I'm a 25-year-old married mother of two. I don't have what it takes to go up against something like that.''
The episode last summer drove one more stake through the Internet's non-commercial heart.
Big corporations have a significant and growing presence on the Internet. In March, just 14 companies controlled 60 per cent of users' online time, down from 110 companies two years earlier, tracking firm Jupiter Media Metrix found.
As the Internet becomes more commercialized, companies are able to use the courts, trademarks and copyrights, proprietary technology and deep corporate pockets to control what Internet users do and say, threatening the openness that made the Net unique.
Policy decisions and technological developments in the next year and beyond could give big business even greater power in the online world.
"Clearly, when the community did not toss spammers off the face of the earth, it was a lost cause at that point," said computer scientist Ed Krol, referring to senders of commercial mass-mailers.
Krol, who wrote one of the first guides to the Internet, knew it intimately in the early days when it was a place for researchers at universities and governments to talk about their professions, hobbies and other interests with little interference from lawyers or corporate executives.
After the National Science Foundation lifted commercial restrictions in 1991, companies like Amazon.com opened up storefronts on the Net. America Online flooded mailboxes with promotional disks and brought millions of newcomers online.
Today, the Internet as most people know it is a world of pop-up ads and online registration forms, a world where your credit card serves as your passport
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 http://www.yaysoft.com
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