Katie Manske; Personal abstract.

Here's my shot at the abstract. Sorry its so late..I hope I got all of the "Internet"s capitalized.

Since the advent of the artistic profession, artists have depended on the distribution of their work, in some for or another, to maintain their lifestyle. Through the ages, those methods of distribution have changed in ways that painters in the 1800s could never have imagined, resulting in a more complicated, more vast, and more difficult world for artists. With the advent of the Internet, copyright and intellectual property laws have faced complicated and controversial makeovers, struggling to maintain a balance between artists' rights and the liabilities of service providers. As a result, freelance, small business and independent artists are finding it more and more difficult to safely use the Internet as the necessary tool it is for fear of losing credit for their work. Creating a living as an artist in the competitive environment that exists today, it is hardly reasonable that an artist should have to compete also with savvy companies, lawyers, and complex laws. It is the fundamental right of an artist to receive credit for one's work. Artists should and must maintain all rights to their work when posting on the Internet, and infringers should be held accountable to the artist for said infringements. To ensure this, measures must be taken to ensure that copyright law can be clearly interpreted and applied to online work in a way that is fair to the artist. All art posted on the Internet should be registered in a new system that legally binds artists to their work, ensuring that due credit is received. In this way, parties seeking to use certain copyrighted material can be well informed, and artists can easily lay claim to work that has been misused.