Copyright allows the owners of IP to control, set and monitor whether it can be shared or charged for and Reproduction Rights
Reproduction rights are whether credit has to be given or how it can be distibuted example-printed, modified, or downloaded
Copyrights and IP are very important ownership categories that should be respected and ideally no one should “take” another’s work and place or claim it as their own without checking what license it has. This is like when we all learned in grade school not to plagiarize and give credit where credit is due. This protects the feelings and monetary well-being of the creator. My responsibility is to appropriately credit everything I borrow and place online for others. I know I can decide how I wish my content to be used by registering it with the patent office or take steps like watermarking or posting lower-quality images until someone requests full access to it and work out the details with them. Everything online usually has some Metadata with it that can be traced back to the original source.
Some site content such as Wikipedia have content that has been shared to it and can be modified or updated and most of the content and images are shareable. This acts like an editable encyclopedia public resource for research, the code and how many times the page has been edited can be found at the top under tools and view history and images can be filtered by type of use in your browser, usually Wiki ones appear first.
The rest of the web content is owned or created by someone and is a challenge to protect just like the little house owned by Arther Dent in the Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams. Not only does an alien race want to destroy Earth, but they also want to demolish this house to put an intergalactic freeway there and this can be used to symbolize the uphill battle creators face protecting their assets. When someone violates a copyright, the owner has to sue, write a cease-and-desist notice, work-out a fee for use, or otherwise determine how to respond when they see or are notified their content is being used against their will, in some manner other than intended. Chapter 8 points out that H2G2 (Hitchiker’s Guide) contains contributions too and has been “compiled and recompiled many time over the years, under different editorships.”
