A History of the Internet: Con Díaz Traces the Arc of Digital Copyright

From Napster to Google to AI, copyright law tells the story of the internet

Posted on November 19, 2025 in Featured Reviews

As a part of our efforts to support scholarly work on the ethical and creative usage of technology in libraries and higher education, Choice highlights new and upcoming titles on this urgent topic through long-form reviews. In doing so, we hope to emphasize the importance of these issues and promising resources for addressing them. The following review, written by John Rodzvilla, considers Everyone Breaks These Laws: How Copyrights Made the Online World (Yale, 2025) by Gerardo Con Díaz and also appears in the February 2026 issue of Choice and online. We hope these reviews will introduce new titles to our audience for their personal or institutional collections.

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By John Rodzvilla

Con Díaz, Gerardo. Everyone breaks these laws: how copyrights made the online world. Yale, 2025. 280p bibl index ISBN 9780300251265, $35.00; ISBN 9780300283099 ebook, $35.00.

In Everyone Breaks These Laws, Gerardo Con Díaz (Univ. of California, Davis) examines the development of the internet through the major copyright lawsuits that revised how we understand access to content. The three parts of the book focus on the themes of sharing, breaking, and transforming, three actions that represent how people have interacted with digital content since the 1980s. In each part, Con Díaz looks at key lawsuits in a larger cultural context to show how the desires of one company, organization, or person created a legal outcome that has defined the nature of the internet.  

The first part of the book begins in the days of online bulletin boards, with chapters on Scientology, Playboy, and Napster. All three chapters focus on how users shared content online and explore how interactions in the courtroom and involvement by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation influenced modern copyright law. For instance, Con Díaz shows how Scientology’s attempt at using copyright and trade secret laws to stop posts by an ex-minister was an early attempt at silencing criticism online through copyright law.  

The second chapter begins with Playboy and its attempts to stop people from sharing scanned photos from its magazine on online forums, and ends with the creation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which shifted liability of copyright infringement from the companies that host websites to users on those websites. The DMCA is essential for allowing blogging sites and social media to thrive, as it protects them from being legally responsible for hosting infringing work. 

This watershed leads to one of the most prominent episodes in copyright law at the turn of the century, centered on Napster and peer-to-peer file-sharing sites. Con Díaz’s goal in revisiting Napster isn’t only to talk about the way Napster and similar sites required a reconsideration of copyright to protect creators, but also to show how inexpensive hard drives and speedy internet access allow piracy sites to continue to this day.  

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After laying out the cultural and legal developments of the late twentieth century, Con Díaz explores how the post-Napster internet became a political battlefield. He begins the section with an overview of the two anti-piracy acts in the US Congress that threatened to destroy what most people thought of as the free internet and the blackout protests that influenced congressional votes. The middle of the book looks at how digital rights management (DRM) and the introduction of takedown notices became successful circumventions for content companies. Here, Con Díaz offers a narrative around the weaponization of takedown notices to silence critics. He supplies case studies on attempts to stop information flow about the security faults of Diebold voting machines and the wholesale removal of amateur YouTube videos for copyrighted songs playing in the background.  

The book closes with a section on the transforming nature of content creation and copyright. Con Díaz begins with a brief introduction looking at generative artificial intelligence and the limits of American copyright law, which dictates that copyright applies only to human-made creations. To provide a road map on the effects of modern technology on the creative arts, he focuses on the hip-hop group 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” which has defined our understanding of fair use guidelines in the creative industries. This chapter also focuses on the Arriba Soft and Leslie Kelly lawsuit, which determined the legality of displaying thumbnails of photographs online as fair use.   

This chapter on the complicated relationship between fair use and the internet is followed by a chapter about two lawsuits aimed at Google’s search engine specifically. The first, Field v. Google, defined the opt-out model for dealing with Google’s web crawlers. The second is the more important case, Perfect 10 v. Google, which argued unsuccessfully that Google infringed Perfect 10’s copyright by including thumbnails of copyrighted works that linked to the author’s full images. 

The last chapter in the book pulls together the lessons learned from the legal cases cited throughout. It shows how these changes to copyright allowed for one of the largest internet companies to launch the biggest challenge to the copyright protections afforded to content creators. That challenge was the Google Books Project. The Google Books Project sought to scan all the printed books in the world and incorporate them into Google’s search engine. It tested the limits of fair use by storing copies of every book ever printed in a database, but only showing a limited sample in a search result. Google was only able to start the project because of the rulings against Scientology, the validity of the DMCA, and the ability to link to others’. Even so, the project was met with a copyright lawsuit from the Authors Guild.  

The Google Book Project is the appropriate place for the book to end, as it relies on the rulings from most of the court cases around digital copyright. It is the culmination of the book’s argument that we need to see digital content differently from other forms, as it is much easier for users to share, break, and transform digital content. Con Díaz interjects personal anecdotes that can feel like digressions in what is mostly a very straightforward history of a messy period of copyright changes. The book provides readers with clear explanations of complicated legal cases and ties those cases back to the internet we use today. 

Summing up: Recommended. All readership levels.

Subject: Humanities – Communications; Law & Society

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John Rodzvilla is author of Project Management for Book Publishers (Routledge, 2025). He is an Associate Professor in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Program at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. His research is focused on digital book publishing and workflow modeling within the book publishing industry.

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