Once something has gone from imagination to fixed form (paper, computer, online, etc) the law protects that work with a copyright. When someone else uses that creation without permission from the creator, copyright infringement has occurred.

On the Internet today, copyright protection issues are increasingly taking center stage while the judicial and legal systems scramble to keep up with the ever-changing face of the web. The average Internet user is not likely to know or understand copyright law, and there seems to be an idea amongst many that anything found on the Internet is in the 'public domain'.

Copying and pasting the web content someone else created infringes upon the creator's copyright. The ubiquity of web content and different licensing rights for the use of that content, including the rights one has to give to social networks to be able to post a blog post, confuses the issue of copyright on web content even more.