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The Year in Internet Law
owenPS writes: "This New York Times article has "excerpts from e-mails written by six legal experts about the year's most important developments in law and technology...As in years past, the common element in the experts' responses seemed to be a sense that Internet law -- and cyberspace itself -- is still unfolding and that new battle lines are forming even as old conflicts are settled.""
From the Lawrence Lessig interview:
"The more I'm in this battle, the less I believe that constitutional law on its own can solve the problem. If Americans can't see the value of freedom without the help of lawyers, then we don't deserve freedom. We should be working to help Americans recognize freedom again."
I support the ACLU. Do you do ANYTHING?
The following is just a sig.
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
Things like sales tax, censorship, and criminal law take whole new meanings online and cannot be held to the old standard. Napster's distribution model disagreed with the old thinking, but proved that not everything can be applyed to those laws.
It's important to realize this before the internet ceases to be relatively free.
Adversive
My cat's breath smells like cat food.
Cass Sunstein
University of Chicago Law School
2. The growing belief that copyright law and the First Amendment are on a collision course. When some people's copyright protections mean that other people can't say what they want to say, there is going to be a constitutional issue. The issue has been neglected for decades. It isn't being neglected anymore.
The full brunt of this issue will come as a sharp slap to the face of everyone involved in this industry if Microsoft, Adobe and others are allowed to continue to get away with gag orders restricting or preventing the announcement of security holes.
It will make an interesting test case when one company sues another for, say, loss of data and it turns out that the defendant was prevented from making it known to the plantif that its IP was at risk because of a third company's restriction on the defendant's ability to act on a security flaw they knew about which would have saved the plantif's data.
Let's say that the defendant is hosting a credit-card brokerage's database. Let's say that the database is compromised and data is stolen at great cost to the brokerage. They'd be insured, sure, but might take action if they learned that the defendant was aware of security holes in the database. What happens when the defendant says that they were aware of the hole but were unable to patch because a patch hadn't be released and were unable to notify their client because of a gag order imposed by the lawyers of the company that produced the database?
surely it should be "American Internet Law" not "Internet Law", in which case not a lot happened since DMCA and RIAA and the like means absolutly nada in the rest of the world, we can copy cd's dvd's whatever we like without dumb lawyers pointing fingers
Although the analogy you bring up certainly has merits, it is, as analogies often are, flawed. In the case of the internet it is quite hard to identify where each of the 100,000 units in your example are at a given time. It is not even possible to tell which route they took after the transaction has been completed. On top of that, the reason why the international shipment cases work the way they do is that most jurisdictions have exceptions in their laws specifically for the transportation of physical goods in order to make international trade easier to work from a legal perspective. These exceptions are specifically designed for these cases and are not necessarily easily applicable to internet transactions. Moreover, most of these national rules that allow other legal systems to take precedence over national law by contract, do not allow such clauses in cases were consumers are involved. Otherwise their consumer protection laws would be rendered invalid because every corporation would consider for example Afghan law to be applicable for any transaction you as an end-user would have with them and put such a clause in their standard contracts.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
I don't have to show my ID when I buy the paper in a store, so I'm buggered if I'm going to give my details to some marketing-droid just to view it online.
No, the internet is totally international, but users, content providers, ISPs are all going to be subject to law somewhere. Sometimes this is fairly sound and sensible (e.g. paedophile rings which have been cracked by analysing their internet traffic patterns, but prosecuted on the basis of information stored on their disc drives). Sometimes it isn't (a UK ISP was fined for failing to cancel a Usenet posting which was deemed libelous - the court took the view that they were publishing Usenet rather than a carrier).
The internet may be international, like the sea, but the actors in the network, be they content providers, ISPs or users, are somewhere, and can be subject to law wherever they are. Your views on the law may influence where you decide to live.
If I spend $1,000 on proprietary software in the US, and import it across the wire, I'm still subject to paying UK import duty/VAT even though it's not coming through a port, and the retailer is still subject to sales tax wherever (s)he sold it. If I then make an illegal copy of that software and pass it to my friend, I'm still subject to action under UK law for breach of copyright.
Similarly, if I decode a DVD and make a copy of the content, then DMCA or no DMCA, it's still a copyright breach the same as if I copy a music CD onto a CD-R.
It seems as if the legal head-up-arse syndrome has come from an inability or unwillingness to tackle the subject of copyright infringement at the point where it happens, and instead to try to use law against the wrong targets. Remember, before CD-R the record companies were trying to get a levy introduced onto blank cassettes on the assumption that blank cassettes were only ever used for illegal copying - i.e. to levy for an unproven offence.
What's new isn't the need for law, or even the applicability of law, it's the newfound increase in difficulty of its enforcement. IMHO, there is a particular onus on lawmakers when they make law which forbids something which I can legitimately do today - I need a higher level of proof that such law is necessary and will be effective. Where such law is being introduced for my security then if the case is properly put I will consent to that loss if liberty (e.g. drink driving laws). Where such law is being introduced for someone's commercial benefit (e.g. the banning of reverse engineering or decoding) I don't find that the burden of proof has been met.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
When I submitted this story on the 28th, it was rejected. Today it's accepted. I love the consistency.
this is getting old and so are you
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