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Cyberspace a Separate Place?
Sierran writes: "According to the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of appeals (and reported by The New York Times) cyberspace (and a person's or corporation's activities therein) exist in 'a place' distinct from their physical location. This has some interesting legal ramifications; does this mean we'll see Internet 'virtual estate' zoning as in Stephenson's Snow Crash?" Most courts have held the opposite - that internet activities are firmly rooted in the real world, located wherever the computers and people are.
Does this mean that patents held in real life don't apply in cyberspace? What about domains? Intellectual property? What laws are there in cyberspace? Can I copy mp3s online as long as I don't burn them to CD and listen to it off of that?
Everything I know in life I learnt from
There seem to be two ways of establishing legal traditions. One is to plan things out ahead of time, being aware of the mistakes of the past, and the other is to muddle one's way through, sort of making it up as you go along. Our system, based on English common law (but much changed from it), is definitely in category two.
Do you trust our modern-day lawyers and judges to decide something so important as jurisdictional boundaries on the Internet in the anonymity of thousands of courtrooms? And, furthermore, isn't this Congress' job? Last I checked, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the right to choose which courts hear which items (with the caveat that whenever courts hear something, the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction). I'm not that eager to put something like this in the hands of the people who gave us the DMCA, but I prefer a public debate to the mess we're going to get if we let lawyers slug this out behind closed doors using arcane rules that have frequently produced nigh-incomprehensible results.
Personally, I think the concept of "rights" as something that individuals hold in relation to governments (including their own) is just about over in the United States.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting today the the U.S. Government is currently holding at least 300 people in connection with the 9/11 incident. These 300 are being held in secret, without being allowed to communicate with attorneys, without their attorneys being informed when court proceedings are being held, without family members being informed where the prisoners are being held or even that they _are_ being held, and with all records of the proceedings being kept under "seal" (a concept that I don't believe appears in the Constitution of the United States).
Any objections to that? You will probably be next.
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