Since Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn engineered the expansion of ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency net) into the Internet in 1973, it has become a popular and powerful educational tool. The World Wide Web in particular offers an almost unlimited amount of material for student researchers (see Blair, 2002). With billions of documents stored on millions of servers throughout the world, the great diversity of people who use and produce webpages, and minimal control of Internet activity, the line between freedom and anarchy is blurred beyond recognition. The various users and producers each have their own individual motives for constructing and accessing webpages. The situation raises some complex issues about the proper use of the posted material, issues that will not be resolved easily or soon. The potential for tension and conflict between the academic, artistic, and commercial sectors of the Internet was forcefully brought home to me a couple years ago when I received demands from an irate webmaster and frantic pleas from university administrators to "remove photos"--actually, direct links to photos--from a student's webpage on my website. While I was happy to comply, this gave me a personal incentive to take a hard look at the situation from both academic and non-academic perspectives.

        Much of the confusion about the proper use of images on the World Wide Web is rooted in its newness. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created only three months after the launch of Sputnik I to eliminate inefficient duplication among the many groups involved in the U.S. government's high-tech research programs (Bryant, 2000). By 1966 attention focused on creating a computer network that would enable people around the country to share their computer resources. ARPAnet expanded into a global network--the Internet with file sharing, e-mail, and remote logons. The idea to store and connect information in a web-like structure came to Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. He created Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) and the system of Uniform Resource Locator (URL) addresses. Four years later Marc Andereessen and Eric Bina of the University of Illinois added two seminal improvements to the system with their browser program called Mosaic: (a) images and (b) hyperlinks that opened with just a click of the mouse. Over the next two years the Web went from eleventh place in Internet traffic to first, thanks in part to the fact that Jim Clark and Andereessen posted Netscape Navigator on the Web and gave it away to non-commercial users. We are only ten years removed from these image/link innovations. It is not surprising that many people still think about the use of images on the World Wide Web as if they were images in a book. The Web, however, is not just a super-sized digital library. It is also a copy machine.

        I would like to express my sincere thanks to Charles Hugh Smith for valuable critical comments on earlier drafts. Not all of the advice received was necessarily heeded, however, and I retain full responsibility for the final product.

        Any comments on this article will be welcomed and should be mailed to the author at Aichi Gakuin University, Junior College Division, 1-100 Kusumoto-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Japan 456-0037 or e-mailed to him. Other papers and works in progress may be accessed at http:// www.aichi-gakuin.ac.jp/ ~jeffreyb/ research/ index.html .

Blair, J. (2002). Research and Process Writing on the Internet. Faculty Journal of the Jr. College Division of Aichi Gakuin University, 10, pp. 94-106.

Bryant, S. (2000). The Story of the Internet. Edinburgh: Pearson Education.