Does the Internet blur the lines of “legally owned”?

Interesting topic our professor presented this week. When you consider an Internet site like Wikipedia (normally I try not to) I think in some ways it does blur the lines of legally owned. People post information to Wiki that they've obviously gotten from other places, whether from the Internet or in books. I avoid Wiki like the plague for the simple reason that it's not reliable because people post their opinions and misinformation constantly. With that said, I do wonder if much of what we learned and repeat isn't legally owned in some way? If for example we study a textbook and hopefully walk away with knowledge gleaned from that textbook, doesn't that knowledge in some way belong to the authors of the textbook? Should we walk around with those references tattooed on our forearms? Obviously not. So we do share thoughts that belong to others without giving them credit all the time to some extent. I suppose when it's in a public place such as the Internet and research papers, that we must be diligent in giving credit to the original author.

Another Internet site that I think does definitely blur the lines of "legally owned" is YouTube. To heck with blur, it outright stomps all over copyright laws. I've seen many videos that belong to anywhere from recording artists to television shows. Many people use music and songs to go along with their homemade videos that belong to recording artists. I'm amazed that the site is still permitted to exist with how sue happy our country has become in the past two decades.