You might have to go back to the initial epoch printing press to find a publishing technol

ogy as disruptive. The internet can reproduce content and distribute it almost anywhere at nearly light speed. You can call it the perfect copying machining—with an out tray to everyone.

And that's the trouble. (1) For any creator of "intellectual property" —text, software, music, video, and so on—the internet is challenging the fundamental notion of who owns the content and how it can be used. This week, the issue reached the United States Supreme Court in a case that may go a long way toward deciding what rights creators have. The issue isn't clear cut.

(2) Protect the creators too much and it may inhibit technological progress and chill artistic expression, some argue. Others say the technology and culture of sharing electronic files has made the philosophy of "all rights reserved" outdated. What's needed, some observers urge, is a new copyright that recognizes a middle ground between all rights and no rights to a work of art.

In court, the big music and film companies "can win every single case, but they can't put the genie back in the bottle because people have discovered that they have the tools of participation," says Andrew Zolli, founder of Z+Partners Company. (3) What the internet has done is wrest away from a few producers the ability to sell scarce goods to a large group of consumers through expensive and highly controlled channels, he adds, such as when three commercial networks controlled what TV viewers saw in the 1960s. (4) Now everyone with access to a computer has the tools to produce as much media products—if not more—than they consume.

(5) Indeed, the internet hasn't only made copying easy, it also has helped foster a culture in which some artists create new work by literally reusing or remixing the work of others. Hip-hop music, built on the idea of "sampling" the beats or sounds of earlier music, is the most obvious of several examples. "The very works that we seek to copyright are built from found objects of other cultural products," Mr. Zolli says.

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