At the SXSW festival a few weeks ago, rock legend Bruce Springsteen gave a keynote speech in which he admitted to "getting inspiration", shall we say, from the work of other artists. He demonstrated by segueing neatly from The Animals' version of 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' into his own song, 'Badlands'. "It's the same riff, man!" he said. "Listen up, youngsters, this is how successful theft is accomplished."

It's rare for musicians to be so brazen about it, but Springsteen was acknowledging an undeniable fact: that new creative ideas generally evolve from old ones. Borrowing, refining and rehashing have been rife for centuries, a magpie-like swiping of melodies, pictures, chords and textures. It grew more noticeably in the 1970s and 1980s; twin record decks allowed early hip hop DJs to mix tracks together and create their own sound collages, bands like the Art Of Noise started using digital audio in legally questionable ways, and when samplers became affordable the Beastie Boys cut-up techniques inspired a generation.

The copyright position

Copyright owners fought back hard in the 1990s, and those early records probably couldn't be made today; licensing the samples would be too expensive. But computers and more latterly the internet have heralded a new era of creative expression, where an almost limitless supply of pictures and sound can be easily appropriated and changed.

Mashups have become endemic, practiced openly by millions, seemingly in violation of copyright law. But are we wilfully engaging in criminal activity by modifying and then sharing other people's work? Or has the law simply failed to catch up with the way we use technology?

In the USA the constitution enshrines the concept of "fair use" - the right to use someone's work for the purposes of satire or parody. The vast majority of mashup culture could be considered parody; from the Photoshop contests on websites such as B3TA, to videos by Cassetteboy or Swede Mason, to songs like 'Newport State Of Mind' that satirised the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys hit 'Empire State of Mind' a couple of years ago.

But while the law is, at least in theory, on the side of the mashup in America, that's not the case in Britain. Copyright holders can still scare the wits out of people doing the satirising; 'Newport State Of Mind', for example, was ordered to be taken down shortly after it became a viral hit. Two reviews into copyright law in the past few years have recommended that "fair use" be introduced, and politicians such as Vince Cable have backed the measure. But it's still currently illegal. As is ripping a CD to your computer - and the majority of us see nothing wrong in doing that.

The future of mashups

The impossibility of fighting mashup culture seems to be leading to a shift in attitudes. Many people are choosing to make their work available under one of several "Creative Commons" licenses, which may permit downloading and tampering. Corporate attitudes are changing, too; last month saw Getty launch a competition called Mishmash that offered free access to the film libraries of Universal and Warner and Getty's own picture library, with a $5,000 prize given to the best creation.

Those being lampooned are also realising that the publicity resulting from successful mashups may not be such a bad thing. The famous Cassetteboy video of 'The Apprentice' won the approval of Lord Sugar, while the creator of Garfield, Jim Davis, gave permission for the book 'Garfield Minus Garfield', which features Garfield cartoons that have had Garfield removed.

Mashup culture is, by and large, a bedroom hobby, a labour of love, where no-one is really seeking to make money. Millions of people are engaged in it, so copyright owners have to pick their battles – and, unsurprisingly, it's the people who find themselves with a viral hit on their hands who are most likely to hear the knock of the legal profession. It's a strange irony. One day the law may change, but for now, perhaps the best advice to mashup artists is: "Make sure you're not any good at it".

Follow the WebWise guides and make the most of your music.

Read more from Rhodri about music and the internet.

Rhodri Marsden is a writer and musician who regularly details his fascination and exasperation with modern technology and the internet for both The Independent and BBC 6Music.

Social media is exacerbating these often suppressed feelings, according to psychologists - enough, in fact, for the resulting state of mind to be given an acronym: FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. FOMO could range from distress surrounding major life events such as getting married and having children (or, rather, not doing either), to short-term worry over the fact that, say, other people seem to be attending a party to which you were never invited. Facebook, Twitter and latterly Google+ are undoubtedly valuable social tools that connect us with our friends and keep us informed about goings on, but if you're sitting in front of a computer and they've just announced that they're sipping a cool drink on the banks of the River Danube, you'd surely be permitted a twinge of jealousy. The trouble is, the more we're connected, the more these twinges can mount up.

The twin compulsions we have in this social media age to tell friends what we're up to while also reading about their activities can pose a constant philosophical question: Have I chosen the wrong way to spend my time? Answering that question isn't helped by the fact that people generally feel the urge - quite understandably - to project a very positive persona online that might not reflect how they're actually feeling.

When I was young, my parents would tell me that "it's not a popularity contest" if I ever complained about having to do something that made me feel awkward or self-conscious. But social media, by definition, is a popularity contest; the first thing you see on these sites is a tally count of how many friends or followers people have. So everyone is on something of a personal PR drive, telling all and sundry how great everything is; this might not be the case, but it's almost impossible for us not be affected by it. It sometime feels like a race to become the most visibly satisfied - but is it making us happy?

As our connections with each other via the internet become stronger, there's a mental adjustment that needs to be made to cope with that new experience of being in each other's faces all the time. It's surely possible to turn FOMO on its head, to transform it from a negative phenomenon and use it as an inspiration instead; see people achieving great things, and think "Yes! I can do that!" After all, we make our own success in life, and sitting indoors and feeling uncharitable about other people is spectacularly unproductive. But if you do happen to be feeling a bit low, it might be worth steering clear of tweets and Facebook posts by people you suspect might currently be blissfully happy.

On an emotional level we value music as much as we ever did, but financially it's suffered from over-supply. A whole generation is growing up without much interest in paying for recorded music, and the industry is hastily diverting resources towards live performance and merchandise in an attempt to get a grip on the situation.

But on the other hand, if you've just formed a band or you're an upcoming solo artist, the internet has revolutionised the process of getting your music heard. The musical DIY revolution happened a long time ago - in the aftermath of punk - but the internet has placed even more of the means of production and distribution in the hands of the individual artist. DIY isn't just an attitude these days, it's a necessity; if you're looking to make a musical splash, you don't just need good songs and a sharp image; you've got to be skilled at online marketing, too.

That might sound like a tedious administrative headache, but the way it puts you instantly in touch with appreciators of your work makes things infinitely more rewarding than they were in the 1990s, or earlier. Back then, you were operating in a bubble, communicating with handfuls of people via the postal service. Today, you don't need a record contract for hundreds, thousands or even millions of people to hear your music.

MySpace has traditionally been a go-to destination for a) bands needing a quick and easy online presence and b) those within the industry looking for young talent. MySpace has undergone a much-reported decline in recent years but has attempted to repurpose itself as an exclusively music-driven site, and it's still worth establishing a page for yourself there - not least because it tends appear high up in Google searches for artist names.

But the torch is now largely being carried by a three-year old website called Bandcamp, which has replaced MySpace in the affections of the DIY musician: it's better designed, allows people to either listen to, download or buy your tunes (depending on your preference) and offers detailed statistics about your listeners. Yes, the site takes a 15% cut of any money you receive, but it's probably the best set of tools yet devised for the independent artist.

The holy grail of monetising your music is something that's discussed at length on the web, particularly on sites like musicthinktank.com. Many musicians are happy enough to upload their tunes to a site like soundcloud.com and let people listen, download and comment as they wish, but if getting the dollars rolling in is a priority, there are options. Just don't expect it to be an easy ride. 'Crowd funding' has been much talked about in the past few months; websites like Kickstarter, Pledge Music, Feed The Muse and RocketHub offer creative projects the chance to be funded upfront by the internet community in return for signed copies of the finished product, special concerts or various other enticements.

Then, once your album is made, websites like emubands.com can assist you in putting your release onto iTunes and Spotify, the two pre-eminent sources of music online. But needless to say, unless you do a lot of work while sat in front of a computer, no-one's going to know that your music is sitting there. A bit like having a telephone line installed, but not telling anyone the number.

Letting people know you exist is the most difficult task of all, and it's about building communities. Facebook, with its 600 million members, is an obvious place to start. Twitter, if you can get the hang of its idiosyncratic style, is another. Don't ignore YouTube, either. You might not consider yourself a film maker, but putting visuals together is much easier and cheaper than it used to be, and really important from a promotional point of view; 9 out of 10 videos researched on Google are music videos, and people are undoubtedly keener to watch a music video than listen to an mp3.

Then, after you've built this intricate social network of fans eager to hear a new masterpiece, all you have to do is come up with it. After all, it's about the music, not the glory, right?

Visit the WebWise guides to audio and video for more advice on enjoying music online.

Rhodri Marsden is a writer and musician who regularly details his fascination and exasperation with modern technology and the internet for both The Independent and BBC 6Music.

Did I learn from my experience? Of course not. A couple of months ago I took a photograph of my computer and posted it on Twitter - there was a good reason for this, I promise you - before I suddenly realised that there was a post-it note stuck on my computer that contained my credit card number, the expiry date and the 3-digit security code. All of which were now visible to the world.

And even if I deleted the photo - which of course I did - there was no way of knowing who might have reposted it, copied it, or the number of servers around the world that now contained a pristine copy of my credit card details. The genie was out of the bottle, so I had to make a slightly embarrassed call to my credit card company.

People think of the net as like a public noticeboard, but that's really not the best analogy. If you pen a piece of soppy poetry and make the questionable decision to pin it up in your local library, you can take it down when you realise your catastrophic error. But the consequences can be more far-reaching if you post such a thing online. Material lingers, duplicates and spreads, and your verse can quickly become a self-replicating personal catastrophe as the world is loudly informed that you "wuv your ickle kitten".

Even deleted web pages can be archived by search engines. For example, when you do a Google search, looked for the "Cached" link next to each result - it can often reveal an older version of each page. Services such as FreezePage, meanwhile, exist precisely to capture transient moments on the web and have been used to cause embarrassment. Then there's archive.org - a colossal repository of web content from yesteryear - and Google Groups, which archives all the discussions that have ever taken place on Usenet.

Ten years ago Usenet was the premier online discussion forum, but no-one ever imagined that their online bickering would be unearthed a decade later. What about ill-thought out blog posts that, on reflection, you decided to delete? Automated content collectors may well have grabbed those and sent them whizzing around the net while you're asleep. Of course, none of these services set out to undermine us - they can be fantastically useful - but they can easily double up as sources of shame and regret.

Social networking sites make things even more problematic. They constantly badger us to share information about ourselves and others, and in many cases we're unaware that these things are visible until someone contacts us and says "er, did you know that there's a picture of you being sick at a wedding on Facebook?" Cue a personal plea to the person who uploaded it; but there's no guarantee they'll remove it.

And you can unwittingly do this kind of thing yourself without realising, too. Last.fm is a good example: it's a service that shows the world a list of what you've been listening to on your iPod or your computer, and can provide a fascinating data set about your listening habits. But do you want the world to know that you spent one Saturday afternoon listening to The Wombles on repeat? Probably not.

There are many who'll post things online while breezily saying that they have nothing to hide. But they may change their tune when a potential employer discovers that they once built an online shrine to a member of Girls Aloud, for example. It's probably not mentioned in their CV, but, thanks to the internet, it may as well have been.

Because the internet's a wild beast you can't control: stuff you're desperately looking for might be impossible to find, but the things you dearly wish would disappear forever can remain stubbornly, embarrassingly visible. Fortunately, most of the information we put out there is frivolous and unimportant - but it's always good to think twice before clicking "send".

If you'd like to learn more about etiquette and libel on social networks, have a look at our new Social Media Basics course.

Rhodri Marsden is a writer and musician who regularly details his fascination and exasperation with modern technology and the internet for both The Independent and BBC 6Music.

But a more fundamental level of security whose importance we often disregard is the humble password. This string of letters and numbers is, after all, often the only barrier that exists between an evil CyberLord and your email, your Facebook page, the files on your computer - even your money.

It's a bit of a wild west out there, and there are many ways that you can have your password prised out of you. Perhaps a virus on your computer that logs the keys you press and sends that information back to some criminal mastermind, or what are known as "social engineering" techniques, which often take the form of a spam email urgently requesting you to click through to a website and "verify" your password - but, of course, it's not authentic.

This can be a bit of a rigmarole for criminals, however, and guessing your password can be much easier - not least because we're horribly unimaginative. I once worked in an office where stringent security measures were taken; backups of all company data were made at the end of every day onto a special hard disk, which was then taken off-site and stored in a locked safe overnight. But all our email passwords were set to the same thing: "pass123". Staggering, no?

Don't take chances

A huge number of people choose passwords that are simply a word in the dictionary, or a name, or a place name. And it's quite possible that those people will carry on using them and say "Well, I've never been scammed." But that's a bit like wandering blindfolded around town and saying "Well, I haven't been hit by a car yet."

A number of us have wised up a little and are aware that a combination of letters and numbers is a good idea, but guessing a supposedly unique combination of those is easier than you might think. A few years ago a password-cracking study combined 1,000 common passwords - things like "letmein", or "123456", or that still inexplicably popular choice, "password" - with 100 frequently-used suffixes - things like 1 or 7, 4u or abc. And by doing so they managed to crack 24% of a random sample of people's passwords.

It's not enough to think that, simply because it contains letters and numbers, "blink182" is a good choice of password, because tens if not hundreds of thousands of other people will have had exactly the same idea. The most popular password in the world used to be "password", but today it's "password1". Not much of an advance, is it?

The other issue is that we tend to use the same password everywhere. Just consider the number of websites you visit where you log in using an email address and password. I'd bet that many people reading this use the same password to actually retrieve messages from that email address - so every time we sign up to a website, we're essentially surrendering the details of our email account. We do this automatically, without even thinking.

Make it memorable with music

So, how to choose a password that's offbeat and unorthodox, but doesn't need to be written down for us to remember it? The best method I've found is based on songs. We all have our favourite lines of lyrics, and the initial letters of those words, interspersed with a memorable number, is infinitely more secure than "holiday123". And we'll always remember it, because we love the tune.

But what about the problem of different passwords for each website? Well, there are password management services that can remember all your passwords for you, but to access them you need to come up with - yes - a password. And the most secure place to store passwords is always going to be your head.

So what I do is incorporate part of the name of the website into my passwords: perhaps stick the second letter of the name of the website at the beginning of the password. Or the third at the end. Or something else. It's up to you.

This might all sound preachy, and I wouldn't blame people for thinking it doesn't matter. But I've been defrauded in the past for not following these rules, and you wouldn't want to look as stupid as me, now, would you?

Rhodri Marsden is a writer and musician who regularly details his fascination and exasperation with modern technology and the internet for both The Independent and BBC 6Music.

But alongside this outpouring of human creativity is substantial proof of human cruelty and human frailty, too. We can all get things wrong, leap to conclusions, get offended and get angry, but the way the net encourages us to express all this publicly tends to magnify bad feeling. Offloading our thoughts about politics, sport, or soufflé making is inevitably followed by someone telling us where we can stick our soufflé ideas. And we instinctively fire back with choice words of our own.

But what is it about the internet that makes everyone so cross? If I was walking down a street and a stranger started criticising my hat, self-preservation would force me to ignore them and keep walking. I might even take off my hat. But online, I'd square up to that person and get dragged into an interminable slanging match – over a hat, for goodness sake – that only served to entrench the opinions of both parties.

We almost feel compelled to be unpleasant. Intense, long-running debates are endemic; on Wikipedia, for example, there have been huge disagreements about the correct spelling of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, and under the entry for "hummus" there are about nine nations (including Israel, Turkey and Lebanon) whose citizens are all claiming that their nation invented it.

Sometimes online spats are down to tribalism; tight-knit online communities will see factions, in-jokes and cliquey language, with derision heaped upon newcomers and petty issues blown out of proportion. Sometimes people are combative purely for the sake of it – so-called "trolling". But the biggest factor is anonymity.

Now, online anonymity is a useful thing (online privacy campaigners would say it's essential) but you can mete out whatever abuse you like from behind the safety of an alias like "Spaghetti Hoop" without fearing real-life repercussions. I know I'm guilty; I've got an alter-ego named Geoff who expresses himself in colourful language whenever I come across something on the internet that annoys me. You could say I'm a coward for lurking behind Geoff, but the people he's arguing with are equally anonymous and equally angry.

Two years ago there was an American politician called Tim Couch who got so worked up about this issue that he filed a bill proposing to make it illegal to post an anonymous comment online. He meant well; his campaign came hot on the heels of some well-publicised cases of online bullying. But aside from being an attack on free speech, the idea was unworkable, because there's no way that websites can truly establish that people are who they say they are.

While some news organisations, weary of the anonymous or pseudonymous bile that's projected daily, have shut down their online comment facilities (Sky News closed their discussion boards last week), others are moving to systems that link your comments to your Facebook or your Twitter profiles, unmasking at least some of the anonymity and making people think twice before getting nasty.

Some websites, by contrast, thrive on bad feeling. After all, bad feeling guarantees page views, and page views means advertising revenue. One alarming example is the website, failin.gs. It looks like a social networking site, but its purpose is to invite friends to anonymously point out your faults. They call it "constructive criticism", but as someone who makes an effort to avoid knowing what people actually think about me, I call it a recipe for misery.

You know on Amazon where there's a product page and then a load of reviews underneath? Well, it's like that. Except the thing people are reviewing is your personality. You might wonder why anyone would go looking for themselves on such sites at all, but they do. In their thousands. The internet has forced our egos into a very unusual place.

Sadly, spats and finger-pointing are never going to go away; it's part of the cut and thrust of the internet, and the best we can do is develop a thick skin and turn the other cheek. Or maybe just don't air our views at all. For example, I get comments on my blog from people calling me an idiot. But my dad doesn't have a blog. As a result no-one calls him an idiot. So who's the idiot?